Nights with Giordano Bruno

The Open Boat
Act I: Wreck
Act II: Setting Sail
Act III: Sabotage
Act IV: Drifting
Act V: The Ship

Kings of Infinite Space
The Archer
The Ram
[Extracts from Julie's Diary]
The Lion
[Extracts from Julie's Diary]

Scenes from an Antarctic Journal
Primus-Pricker
The Heart of the Snow
Dark Depths

The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole
Valentine's Day
Glasgow's Miles Better
Artist
Diva
Siren
Trampled Grapes
Byron
The Necklace
The Gateway

Title

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[Cover image: Max Ernst, Une Semaine de Bonte (1933)]

NIGHTS WITH
GIORDANO BRUNO

Jack Ross

Recto

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Nights with Giordano Bruno
Copyright: Jack Ross, 2000

First published by Bumper Books
“experimental texts & investigative
cultural studies charting moments
when definitions changed”

ISBN 0-9582225-0-9

“Grafton Amours” appeared, in slightly different form, in Pander 9 (1999): 18-19;
“The Great Hunger” in A Brief Description of the Whole World 14 (1999): 34-37.

Acknowledgements are due to these journals for permission to reprint.

Any person who does any unauthorised act with this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

for my brother, K. M. Ross
miglior fabbro

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Grafton Amours

A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
– Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone”

Et comme on passait sur un pont, le prince se mit à la portière pour contempler le panorama romantique du Rhin qui déployait ses splendeurs verdoyantes et se déroulait en larges méandres jusqu’à l’horizon. … A kind of muscular, living pressure – not rubbery, exactly, though it has that same attribute of stretching and contracting, systole and diastole – a portal which does not so much let you in, as allow you to distend yourself. … “And as they were standing below a bridge, he leaned over the grave-stone to observe the romantic panorama of the gully which … displayed? deployed? … its green splendours and wound away in large curves to the horizon.”

You pant and groan – rough, hoarse as an animal. Which is what you are, of course, though circumstances may sometimes obscure the fact for a moment or two. But scarcely here, now. Your ribs crack, crackle with the contrast between sweat and chill. Il était 4 heures du matin, des vaches paissaient dans les prés, des enfants dansaient déjà sous des tilleuls germaniques. Une musique de fifres, monotones et mortuaire, annonçaient la présence d’un régiment prussien et la mélopée se mêlait tristement au bruit de ferraille du pont et à l’accompagnement sourd du train en marche. … Is it four in the morning? Quite possibly. Are there cows in those fields? Not likely; but the children are certainly dancing beneath the disordered boughs of the trees: these children of your city, ill-dressed and ill-nourished, smelling of earth and rain and flesh. And, hark! far-off, through the death-fed trees, the music of a police siren, “monotonous and mortuary, was announcing the presence of an authoritarian constabulary, and the sweet sound blended with the humming noise of cars proceeding over the iron bridge.”

“F … f … fucker, bloody fucker …”

No reply, at this point, seems appropriate or called for. But that is increasingly the case in most of life’s situations, for you. A simple greeting across the lunch counter, a cheery “Enjoy the film!” from a cinema usherette, they each seem to demand the one, correct reply: that witty twist or humorous acknowledgement which would seal your commonality, commensals at the feast of life. You cannot achieve it. It demands a thousand words of long

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I was a quartermaster and had charge of No. 4 lifeboat.
– Angus Macdonald

• Scene [Opening Credits begin in darkness]:

Bruno Lawrence
in
A Louis Malle Film

THE OPEN BOAT

As the words fade out, it becomes apparent that there is movement in these dark depths, but the audience is uncertain, disoriented. A faint pinging is heard, a swirling. Perhaps we are underwater? Is there a shape, black against the blackness, moving through it? We think there is, but are still straining to make it out when …

EXPLOSION.

ACT I: Wreck

• Scene [Awakening (Friday, November 6, 1942, c. 1 a.m.)]

CLOSE-UP of Angus’s eyes opening out of some fathomless depth. Was the noise only in his dreams? It seems not: there are clanging pumps and sirens, shouting voices, all coming from outside.

WIDE-ANGLE shows his narrow, cramped cabin. There are a few pitiful ornaments: a little china cup, framed photographs. He rolls out of his bunk, starts to huddle on clothes and sea-boots.

Out on deck. Angus comes out from behind a steel bulkhead, and is shown pushing his way through a chaos of people running and shouting.

Voices scream: “Over here!” “Out of the fucking way!” “Diana!”

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meandering monologue, or none. Here, at least, you should be safe from it, if anywhere. Your ankles itch beneath their heavy woollen socks. The tan Doc Martens boots feel positively puddled with perspiration. The body approaches its crisis – should you be hoping for an expiation of sins? Des villages heureux animaient les rives dominées par les burgs centenaires et les vignes rhénanes étalaient à l’infni leur mosaïque régulière et précieuse. “Happy villages animated the banks dominated by century-old castles” – miserable old suburbs burdened the slopes dominated by a thirty-year-old motorway system – “and the Rhenish vines extended their precise and regular mosaic to infinity.” Steel-shuttered bottle-shops displayed their graffiti-clad corrugations to disappointed late-night revellers: revellers bound for here, for the nettled undergrowth of the gully.

The sense of peril has not abated – an exodus threatened by every shift of that rippling back, those bony thighs – and yet some progress has undoubtedly been made. Another test, another examination, another assessment of some kind of strange achievement. Can you think of tree-alphabets, do arithmetic problems in your head, translate half-remembered fragments of French prose, long enough to climb Mount Moriah? To what end, really? So that we can all sleep?

Quand Mony se retourna, il vit le sinistre Cornabœuf assis sur le visage d’Estelle. Son cul de colosse couvrait la face de l’actrice. Il avait chié et la merde infecte et molle tombait de tous côtés.

Oh, the filthy, filthy brute! Poor Estelle, whose only crime had been to strangle her maid in the ecstasies of mutual cunnilingus. No-one should be made to translate that, in your opinion. You’re not as bad as that, even if you are in the city’s oldest graveyard at the darkest time of the night, performing the act of sodomy on a convenient gravestone, with a svelte young sprite, whose very sex seemed ambiguous until a moment or so ago.

Il tenait un énorme couteau et en labourait le ventre palpitant. Le corps de l’actrice avait des soubresauts brefs. … “His immense knife was stabbing into her living flesh.” Yes, it is hard, achingly hard, which is more than you expected to achieve at first, when approached. That agonising over-excitement which is so fatal to so difficult an enterprise, so profound a challenge, to penetrate the elastic walls of an organ which defends itself so sedulously from intrusion. “The actress’s body jerked galvanically.” You are disgusting! You’ve pulled up the ripped black T-shirt, and are kissing the malodorous shoulderblades and neck-muscles of your … companion in crime; your hands control those smooth brown

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Angus is shouting now, too, has seized someone (a seaman) by the lapels: “Make way there! Get those lashings loose.” He is clearly in some kind of authority, because people, mainly half-dressed civilians, are climbing into the lifeboat, as he points and yells, overseeing the operation.

We see a name painted on the side of the lifeboat: City of Cairo.

“Heave out there, heave out!”

The boat is now being lowered, and Angus takes a moment to look around him.

“Angus, Angus.” Through the confusion of sound and activity, it gradually becomes clear that someone is shouting for him. He looks a little puzzled, as if the voice were coming from elsewhere, some other place or time.

• Scene [Helping Bob (Friday, 6/11, c. 1.10 a.m.)]

Angus re-enters the slipstream, and starts to make his way to starboard, pushing past busy sailors and milling passengers.

He collides with Bob, who shouts, clearly on the edge of panic: “I can’t lower the bloody boat.”

Angus climbs inside the stalled lifeboat to try and clear a rope, which he does (after a couple of tries) with a violent flick of the wrist; then stays there, fending the boat off the side with a boat-hook, as they begin to lower it into the foaming sea.

EXPLOSION.

Splash.

The camera draws us down into the water.

“Angus, Angus.” A voice is echoing in his ears, but now it sounds like a woman’s voice; we cannot tell whether young or old.

• Scene [Swimming (Friday 6/11, c. 1.15 a.m.)]

CLOSE-UP as Angus’s eyes open again. The camera draws back to make it apparent that he is now floating in the sea, supported by his yellow Mae West lifejacket. His lips move. Though clearly dazed, he is trying to say something. It is a name: “Ellen.”

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The Archer

His first impressions were of a dark wet street, with buildings on either side – high blocks of black windows and walls – and a continual sense of shadow. Of course, the shadows were more illusory than real, for here there could be no sun. His boots rang on the sunken rivets of the paving.

Eventually he came to a tall iron door, with an intercom tube beside it. He pressed on the bell, but heard nothing from within. After waiting a little longer he pressed again. At this, the stained and discoloured video monitor beside the door crackled into life, and he saw the face of a young woman appear. Her hair had been cropped close to the skull, which gave her something of the appearance of a porcupine – an impression assisted by her sunken cheeks and forward-tilted face. Only her head and shoulders were visible, and she was wearing, from what he could see, a rumpled white singlet. She looked as though she had just been awakened from sleep.

“Wha’ fu’?”

“Sorry to disturb, but orders given to report to Building 7, quadrant 34. This is?”

She knuckled her eyes a little and gave a great yawn before replying: “Sorry, yeah. This is Building seven. But I don’t think … we weren’t told anything about you.”

“Orders given. May I come in?”

“Ah … dunno really. Where’re we gonna put you?”

She seemed to be speaking to herself, rather than continuing the conversation. He looked at his watch. The figure it showed was, of course, quite meaningless: a set of arbitrary numbers. He had not yet been issued with a sidereal chronometer, indispensable for the Stations. This was, it seemed, the middle of the night – or possibly, given the girl’s disorientation, the deepest hours of sleep before morning.

Misinterpreting his gesture, the girl frowned slightly and rapped out, “Well, anyway, you can’t stay out there. ‘Orders given,’ you say. I don’t know who the fuck you are, or why we haven’t had any orders about you, but you’d better come in.”

The screen died back into greyness and a short buzzing noise supervened. At once he was transported back to another apartment building, aeons away in

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buttocks, now that you’ve achieved lodgement between them, angling them this way and that to persuade yourself of the pleasure you must be feeling.

And he? What are his sensations? His large hard cock must be throbbing against the lifeless stone, as the gradual surrender of his anus feels more and more like a sharp steel knife swallowed up by quicksand, or like a backed-up case of constipation. Sharp, painful, unclean, fascinating. He’s jerking about more, now, as if losing control of the process, the procès: the trial.

«Attends, dit Mony, reste assis.» Yes, stay still, little one.

Et, se couchant sur la mourante, il fit entrer son vit bandant dans le con moribond. You cannot help but visualise Estelle lying on her back, with the subhuman assassin Cornabœuf straddled across her shit-stained face. Prince Mony thus placed himself between her thighs to enter the dying pussy. … Il jouit ainsi des derniers spasmes de l’assassinée, dont les dernières douleurs durent être affreuses, et il trempa ses bras dans le sang chaud qui jaillissait du ventre. “He thus enjoyed the victim’s last spasms, which must have been horridly painful, and bathed his arms in the hot blood which spilled from her stomach.” You are bent over your victim, victim more of economics than of your insignificant lust, as your cock begins to spasm. The frustration of the double membrane – living and manufactured – is compounded as you retreat, frustrated at the lack of fleshly contact. The condom receives your seed, nevertheless, along with his mingled blood and shit.

Quand il eut déchargé, l’actrice ne remuait plus. Elle était raide et ses yeux révulsés étaient pleins de merde. “When he had discharged, the actress was no longer moving.” A prostitute, no matter how amateurish, must be a kind of actor, must feign enough humanity to promote the customer’s arousal. A boy who bends over to get money may have no interest in the act, but he knows that his masculinity is at the very least called into question by it. You disengage yourself quite quickly from him, half-expecting an elbow in the face or a gob of spit. What he does takes you therefore quite by surprise. “She was stiff and stark, and her revolted eyes were full of filth.” His eyes are bright and alive. He seizes you by the back of the neck (jeans halfway down, limp-dangling cock still cocooned in its ridiculous plastic cover, business shirt rucked up and clinging sweatily to your back) and kisses you hard on the open mouth, his tongue squirming deep inside, bad teeth forgotten.

You are Estelle, his willing bitch, at that moment, albeit fresh from mastering his arse (though could you ever, from the first, think that was what you were doing?) When he releases you, defiant and upright in his grey sweats,

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It is very dark, and he is surrounded by ghostly shapes. A body floats by, and he clutches at it before seeing the huge gaping wound in the back of the young sailor’s head. He recoils, then pulls at the light-switch on his jacket, but nothing happens.

He is now muttering under his breath: “Got to keep moving. What’s that over there? Bugger me. Better go and see.” He does not seem to be conscious of what he is saying, which is getting more and more disjointed. At times he appears to imagine he is speaking to Ellen. “Ellie, we got to get rid of that cat,” he says. “That’s the third time the little shit’s tripped me coming in the door.”

There is a light swell, but little wind. As he swims on through the darkness, he sees that the largest nearby object is in fact a lifeboat. It is extremely low in the water, half-swamped, but there are still a few people sitting in it. Others are clinging to the ropes and trailing ends of canvas around the sides. Their faces bear an indescribable look of apathy, mixed with dawning shock.

• Scene [Bailing out the boat (Friday 6/11, c. 1.30 a.m.)]

With no help from those on board, Angus flops across the almost submerged gunwale.

“Some of you have got to get out so we can bail her dry,” he says. Nobody moves. “Come on, you’ve got to,” he repeats, more coaxingly.

Insert: [Dark night. Angus is on the far side of a pane of glass, with frost streaking the edges. “Ellie, please,” he is saying. “Let me in. You’ve got to. It’s bloody freezing out here.” His face continues to stare in, registering little hope, but an immense resignation. Is there movement from our side of the window?]

One of the older women says “Come on, children,” and begins to climb clumsily over the side of the boat, assisted by her eldest daughter, and followed by her other two children. The others reluctantly imitate her, including (latterly) the men.

Angus stops one young woman with two babies, and says, “No, that’s enough.” He would clearly like to do something more for the cold and shivering girl, but has to content himself with patting one of the babies on the head. “Good girl, good girl,” he croons. The baby begins to cry.

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complicated pockets and harness. She had not troubled to put on her boots, so her bare feet poked out somewhat incongruously from the heavy, stained folds.

“Here I am,” he said, feeling the occasion demanded some comment. For some reason, this seemed to amuse her greatly.

“Here you are! But who’re you, and what are we supposed to do with you?”

It was only a token protest at this stage, though, as she ushered him through the door into a little apartment behind. As prescribed, the first thing he did on the threshold was to stop and quickly pan around the room, recording its contents.
Misreading, again, his reactions, the girl pushed him half-playfully from behind: “Go on in. She won’t bite!”

She was referring, he inferred, to the presence of another young woman in the room in front of him. This one was wearing a blue terry-cloth dressing-gown, and was far more feminine in appearance than the spiky young uniform behind him. She had long black hair, which she had evidently just been washing, for she was dabbing at it with a rather ratty-looking towel, and looked distinctly put out to see him.

“Excuse … intrusion.” He managed to come up with the second word eventually, although it was a struggle to remember it. They had warned him of the possibility of some such partial aphasia in the secondary speech areas, but he had not since then had his abilities so tested as in this particular encounter.

As he walked into the room, he found himself regarding the new young woman with immense interest and curiosity. She too had her feet bare, and he concluded that there were no irregularities in the steel floor to damage them. Her toenails, he was interested to observe, were painted purple, though the finger nails were regulation length.

“My God, where did they find you!” the new young woman (he found himself mentally classifying them as long-hair and short-hair) exclaimed incredulously.

Short-hair had now come in, closing the door behind her, and stood observing the scene with malicious pleasure.

“Julie, I’d like to present to you our guest, Mister Orders Given, from Outside. His hobbies are ringing bells, running up stairs to impress people who couldn’t give a fuck, and hanging around in doorways …”

He waited a little to see if there was any more, but her fund of invention seemed to have dried up, and said: “Lieutenant.”

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Primus-Pricker

We decided to camp for the night. Some hours later I woke up to hear a blizzard blowing outside, and to find Filippo fumbling amongst some gear at the head-end of the tent. From inside my bag I called out to inquire if there was anything wrong, and received a reply that he was looking for the primus-pricker. Then he slipped back into his sleeping-bag, and all became quiet, except for the snow beating against the tent … Revolving the incident in my mind, and dimly wondering what use he could have for a primus-pricker in the middle of the night, I again fell asleep … On inquiry I found that Filippo knew nothing of his midnight escapade. It was a touch of somnambulism.

The snow beating against the tent. Soft flakes piling up into hard, sculpted drifts, blown into aerodynamic contours – sastrugi. Snow is so soft and deep. And slushy-wet and burning-cold and diamond-hard. Snow is like sleep.

The day is stink of men and food and foul air, dogs barking, fingers pricked by needles which slip from the hands. It is the itch of an unwashed body, the rub of harness. It is longing for a hard steel hut, and desire for the wind to stop. Stop just once, just once long enough for us to stand clear and see – see that ethereal stillness so few feet above our heads – the silence of those infinite spaces.

This afternoon I found myself thinking about Melbourne, and that led me to the evening I met that girl. She was clean enough, I suppose, a scrubbed little thing – quite boyish as she minced along. I can’t remember what she said, what I said. We went back to her room (on my insistence), so I had to wait while she ran in to check that the coast was clear. That was strange, standing out in the alley thinking about what I was about to do, or rather trying not to think about it, smoking a cigarette and watching the shadows. She was back soon enough.

Once in her room I insisted she undress completely, although she was very reluctant. I could see why, afterwards. She had a long scar running down the length of her back – a long red curve of cicatrice. It must have been devilish deep at the time. A whip? Too clean for anything but a stock-whip at full stretch, I’d say. More likely a knife. I didn’t ask her about it. Felt ashamed to, I suppose. In any case, it didn’t make me any less interested in what I’d come to do.

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you grope your own pants up and reach out the fifty dollars you had ready in the back pocket. He takes it and moves away with a smile, saying, as he goes, something to the effect of “goo’ night,” though it might well have been followed by “cocksucker” or “whitey” or some such epithet. It had, after all, been he who approached you, spoke to you, offered you sex for money; who tongued and fisted your cock hard; and who finally leant himself, his youthful arse, across the tombstone. The Golden Ass: Apuleius. Why didn’t he simply rob you, you wonder? The money was there all along.

It’s funny how a picture forms itself of many small items, half-apprehended. As you walk back up the slope to your car, through the dark whispering tracks of the cemetery, you think of a dream you once had, a long time ago, a dream where a stone statue turned itself head over heels through the grounds of a park, crushing its way, unstoppable, through ponds and woods and walls. His dark buttocks against the white of the tombstone seemed like an indignant sideways face, about to shout out hoarse commands. The rest of the black and white complex of leaves, shadows, trees might have been made to harmonise with this conception into an Arcimbaldo crowd-scene, faces made of bark and flax.

And what are they doing, the bizarre faces in this crowded canvas? They’re roaring blindly at the leper, the excluded one. Even a boy prostitute can be more in command of his moment, his place, than that bleeding face, shoulder bowed under the weight of a crosstree. So what does that make you? The crucified Christ? The martyr complex is the first thing to explode when the physical organism goes wrong. In this case, when the arsehole-fucking, graveyard-haunting, prostitute-poking, French novel-quoting, extreme experience-craving – Miracle-in-Mary-of-phlegm – blaspheming fucker cannot … cannot what?

GA

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He and the other men start bailing as hard as they can, the water spraying in all directions.

Shot of the other women and children clinging to an upturned oil-drum.

• Scene [“There she goes” (Friday 6/11, c. 1.30 a.m.)]

MEDIUM CLOSE-UP of Angus and another man, Tiny, trying to resuscitate the sodden-looking body of an older man, a passenger. They’re rubbing at his arms ineffectually, and dosing him with little nips of brandy until he coughs and chokes.

WIDE-ANGLE of the boat, now full of miserable-looking people, many of them clearly injured. There’s perhaps a hint of light in the sky as the camera begins to move up from them to show the stricken ship sitting low in the water not far away. Other boats are circling around it like water-beetles.

The City of Cairo is shown silhouetted against the horizon in a succession of near stills, with gradually increasing light providing the time index.

A voice says: “There she goes,” and the ship’s bow lifts up and begins to slide back inexorably into the sea. It is dawn, now, a cold dawn.

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“What?”

“Not Mister, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, look, I’m being really rude here. I’m Hartnell and this is Baker, Julie Baker. It’s our job to look after the dormitory here, and answer the bell. Sit down, please. Can I get you anything? Coffee, water?”

He sat down, stiffly, in the chair furthest away from the long-haired woman, Julie. He felt she didn’t like him already, whereas the other one, short-haired Hartnell (probably a private, or at most corporal, given the job she was doing) was still reserving judgement. He found himself wondering what her first name was, and whether it was a pretty name. He hoped it was. They had warned him also of such emotional imbalances – at first, until his new system adjusted to the stresses and strains.

Objectively, he knew it was of minor importance whether the two young women liked him or not. He had a job to do and so did they – but what he knew and what he felt no longer connected in any meaningful way. He felt that if neither of the women gave him a kind word in the very near future he would howl like a dog in pain and disappointment. Their approval seemed to him, for the moment, the most important thing in the world.

“Please,” he said. “Please. I’m very tired.” And started to cry.

What once would have embarrassed him almost beyond endurance was now something of a relief. The tears flowed. At first he wiped them away with his sleeve, but then he found himself starting to sob, which necessitated covering his face with both hands. At length he stopped, and blew his nose. Only then did he think of the effect this might be having on the two women, who had been shortly before the centre of his universe.

Hartnell was now sitting next to Baker, who had her arms around the shoulders of her friend. They were looking at him with consternation – “Gob-struck,” he thought, proud to have recovered this useful word from his cerebrum.

He felt no need, now, to take the initiative or say the first word. He felt strangely at peace – as if, by humiliating himself so utterly before them, he no longer had any need to fear their reactions. The rest was up to them.

“What’s wrong?” the softer, more feminine girl Baker asked at length.

“Nothing,” he replied, perfectly deadpan and affectless once more. He knew that now they would not take him solely at face value.

“But … do you often do that?” she continued, apparently determined to pursue the matter to its conclusion.

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Afterwards she cuddled up to me a little and asked me if I wanted anything else. Funnily enough, what I wanted most then was a cup of tea. I wanted to ask her for one, and to watch her getting up and making it for me, like a good girl, a girl of good family. Like Effie, or one of the White girls in the old days. I knew she wouldn’t understand, though, and so I didn’t say anything at all. I just started to put my clothes on. She helped me with the boots, then started to pull on her own clothes. I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t dare. Funny, really, when you think that I’d just fucked her, but somehow that seemed less intimate than treating her as a person, a real girl, now, afterwards.

I just walked out of there, then got pissy drunk in a bar by the river.

I suppose it was thinking of the snow that did it – her body was very white, I remember, which made the long scar stand out that much better. God, it must have hurt! Though maybe not: a scar that deep might have a temporary anaesthetic effect. The blood would pump out, but you might just feel a pleasant warmth from it – a kind of narcolepsy, just as we all thought sleeping in the snow would create.

It’s bad thinking about girls. I got a stiffy right away, and even though no-one can see it in these baggy furs it makes you crazy. I could feel myself licking her along her scar, tongue touching every inch of it. Why didn’t I do that then? I could have talked to her more – told her to do any number of things I can think of now. She was a pretty girl, not that it matters. Not pretty like the girls at home, but like a sleek little animal, furry and dark as an otter. She would have done anything for a few more coins. She might even have liked it, to be able to stay in bed instead of going out on the cold street again. Perhaps she ended up with some sailor who belted her arse for her – or some paterfamilias who buggered her while dreaming of his own daughters. She would have been better off with me. I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt her.

I’m certain I could never have whipped her, but now I find I’m thinking of her when I strike the dogs, wondering what kind of a whip had been used on her. On consideration, I think it probably was a knife – like those long gutting knives we use on the seals. Not so long and sharp, of course, or else all her guts would have fallen out on the table and would have had to be stuffed back inside before she could be sewn up.

That was the thing, of course. I can see it now, more real than the wind-flurries, the solid ice visible only a few yards ahead. There were no stitch marks

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Valentine’s Day

The family lived at the top of a long stepladder – a kind of tree-house in the sky. It had been built by their father, with the help of Paul, the eldest son; but Father was dead now, and Paul was the man of the house. Besides Paul, there was Kevin, the second son, and then the two girls.

Melanie was the elder: blonde, lissom, straight-limbed – a golden girl. The youngest was Gillian, darker, somewhat inclined to dumpiness, and always lacking her sister’s grace (and, in consequence, her brothers’ favour). They were never very nice to Jill.

One evening, when the whole family, mother included, had been getting at Jill for her moodiness, lazy ways, and general inability to learn, she burst into tears (this was nothing unusual), rushed out of the room (nor was this), and then started to climb down the ladder to the forest floor (this was going a little far, however – heaven alone knew what might be roaring about down there at this hour of the night).

Paul and Kevin came out to stop her, only to find that she had taken their father’s lighter, and was holding it cocked against the dry straw of the hut platform. Now, fire is something you never joke about if you live on a platform in a tree. It can destroy you in minutes, and so a naked flame was never allowed in the house.

“What are you doing, Jill? Come back at once!” said Paul, in his customary petulant, exasperated tone (by now Melanie and her mother had come out as well – nor was it simply to see the fun, because neither was smiling).

“No,” said Jill quietly, as she eased herself down the first few rungs of the ladder.

“What’s wrong, Jill?” asked Melanie, leaning out to look into the upturned face of her sister.

“You should know, of all people. You were the one they always chose to do the solos in ballet class – you were the one who was excused dish-washing because your hands had to be kept smooth … Well, I’ve had it. I’m off.”

“Don’t be stupid, you little cunt. You won’t get half a mile,” shouted Kevin, the meaner of the two brothers.

“Oh yes, I will. I didn’t start planning this yesterday, you know. But before I do go, I have to tell you some things. The first is, I’m queer. I don’t like boys. I doubt you’ll understand what I’m talking about, but maybe you do, Mel.”

The older sister blushed.

“The second thing is, I’m a witch. I speak to the dead, to dead people. They tell me things. Not always things I want to know, but useful things sometimes.”

15

2008-01-29T08:40:00.000+13:00

God-Botherers

rimettere il diavolo in inferno
– Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decameron (Day 3, story 10)

“Putting the devil into hell.” Quite an elastic concept also, in its way. Then there’s that trick of taking a lighted match, holding it between two fingers, and letting it burn right down to the stub before you suddenly pinch it black with two pads of skin. It stings, scorches, sears (if you’re lucky).

“Gracious ladies, you who have (perhaps) never heard of the operation of putting the devil into hell, there was once a young man who couldn’t sleep. It began, at first, with too intense a concentration on the things of the day. He would lie awake, for hours, in his little apartment, as his mind went over the immense things he could accomplish in just a few hours, or days, or years – starting next morning. When the morning came, however, he found he was invariably too tired to put any of these plans into practice.

“His friends noticed his persistent fatigue, and began to prescribe antidotes. ‘Take a hot bath before you go to bed,’ said one. ‘Clear your mind of the things of the day by repeating these few words,’ said another. ‘Pour yourself a drink of whisky / hot milk / camomile tea,’ chorused the others. All of these remedies he tried, but none of them worked.

“Finally he went to the doctor with his problem, and was given a sleeping draught. At last he could sleep again. But when he awoke he felt as tired as ever: stale, used-up, thick-headed, as if his sleep had not refreshed him at all. So he stopped taking the draughts, and lay awake as before, his mind going over and over the things of the day …”

You are writing in your notebook, a little story about a man who couldn’t sleep, when the doorbell rings. You think (as one does) of not answering it, but curiosity is too strong. Your story bores you [and me], anyway.

There are two of them, quite young. She (perhaps eighteen?) is wearing jeans, a halter top, bare midriff. No, no, no: in order. Long dark hair, hanging down upon slight shoulders, serve to frame a tanned, unblemished face. Her

16

2008-01-29T08:39:00.000+13:00

“The third thing is, I’m leaving for good. I know I can be happier somewhere else, somewhere I’m not shut in at the top of a stepladder in the sky, cut off from the earth and the sea and all the other people. Mel, you can come too, if you want. The rest of you stay put.”

Mel did want to come, for a moment. But then she thought about the first thing her sister had said and, looking at the shocked, uncomprehending faces of her mother and brothers, knew that she didn’t dare. She shook her head.

Jill shrugged and, still brandishing the – long-evaporated – lighter, continued her descent into the dark depths at the foot of the tree. They never saw her again. Melanie cried herself to sleep that night, though, and many of the nights that followed.

[This I dreamed … 14/2/98]

17

2008-01-29T08:38:00.000+13:00

on her scar, so it can’t have been sewn up. Amazing she wasn’t finished off by infection; more amazing that she didn’t bleed to death straight away.

I can see her dancing ahead of me, just ahead in the wind. She’s not naked, but in her furs, with her feet bare in the wind-furrows. How old is she? Fifteen? Fourteen? She’d been had many times, I could feel that, but was still narrow and tight, as only a young girl can be. That’s filthy talk, though. A filthy thing to think. I only want to see her dance, to beckon me on. Her skin is so white, her body so smooth and firm, her little tongue is red as she puts it out to catch a snow-flake.

18

2008-01-29T08:37:00.001+13:00

was seizing hold of him. How dare they call him a robot – insensate hardware. After all, he had wept in front of them, asked them their names. How could he be a machine? The complex fusion of moods was beginning to balance him, though – his overwhelming interest in and sympathy for the two young women warred against his desire to stand up and shout at them.

“You mean … you remember everything you see?”

“Not just remember – classify, record. Little boxes, cubby-holes.” How could he express it to them? He took it for granted they would be interested in understanding all the details of how it worked. “I …” No, that appeared to be all. “Apologies.”

“But … you’re not like us, are you?”

“Treatment.” He shuddered, once, involuntarily. “Long treatment, and long adjustment to optimal conditioning level.”

Ann seemed prepared to leave it at that, but Julie now seemed to have overcome her fear and recovered her initial curiosity.

“So – what do you record exactly, and why did they do this to you?” her voice sounded sympathetic and he responded to her mood with an overwhelming feeling of tenderness. If only he could do something for these two friends of his – help them in some way with the overwhelming powers that were his.

“Shall I show you?”

“Yes!” she returned quickly, ignoring the look of warning in Ann’s large hazel eyes.
“Before I came in, I scanned your room. Scan, Record, Classify. That is our job. Now, I close my eyes and I recall …”

He closed his eyes and recalled everything he had seen. There was also capacity for selection according to given parameters, and he set this to social mood-setting, the level on which one attempted to analyse the emotional temperature of a room or gathering.

“Ann, you are wearing regulation uniform trousers and a white singlet. You sleep in the singlet and put on the trousers if you have to get out of bed. There are sixteen pockets in your trousers, two buttons, thirty-seven stitched seams, of which three are beginning to fray. They are approximately eighteen months old. Julie, you too were in bed, but you decided to wash your hair when the two of you had to get up. Your towel is not clean enough, though. You paint your toe-nails and not your finger-nails because you do not like regulation wear. You have forty-seven eye-lashes and brown eyes with red

19

2008-01-29T08:35:00.000+13:00

eyes are an intense blue. Histoire de l’oeil: Bataille – Tale of the Eye. Slim waist, slim hips, thin legs, black boots combine to form an image of adolescent innocence – or outrage?

He, by contrast, blonde and freckled, thick, half-strangled by incongruous (unaccustomed?) tie and jacket, shorter than his platform-heeled companion, hand outstretched, looks ready equally for scrum or barbecue. The other hand holds, half-shielded, a dark, not unfamiliar book.

“Yes?” (Not unsnottily).

“We’re going door to door to talk about the Lord Jesus Christ and what he’s done in our lives and what he can do in yours too if you’ll let him …” (faltering slightly after that breathless apostrophe) “Would you be interested in talking to us about that?”

The girl smiles, half-nervously, as if to back up her companion’s asseverations of life-changing events without associating herself, necessarily, with his naïve sense of mission.

The flat’s a tip. You’re blinking, bleary-eyed, in tee-shirt, jeans, bare feet.

Why not?

“Why not? Come on in, both of you, and tell me all about it. I warn you, though, I’m not going to buy any steak-knives or subscriptions to video-clubs.”

They exchange disconcerted glances, the first sign of any complicity – intimacy? – between them. [Psycho killers, rules for the detection of: First, unusual determination to invite one into any malodorous vehicle or dwelling they may be occupying at the time; Second, refusal to abide by conventions of polite speech (in this case, dismissal with protestations of uninterest); Third, “looking like everyone else:” indistinguishability from the rest of the population in general affect (no giant warts, seven-fingered hands, ill-concealed claws, insect-like eyes) …]

“Come on in! I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

Further glances. Still, this does come with the territory. They sidle nervously in.

Fighting your impulse to give a sepulchral laugh, slam and bolt the door, and turn on them, leering, with the words: “So the great lord Dagon at last sends me my prey …” you bustle over to the kitchenette, and start to pour water loudly into a kettle.

20

2008-01-29T08:33:00.000+13:00

Glasgow’s Miles Better

Going into a cinema with a pal, – he slipped and fell, – bouncing down three flights of stairs – (huge auditorium, banks of seats: wide aisles). – I followed at a run, then paused. – Girl sitting there said, – “I’ve seen you before.” – I: “Where?” – She: “In Glasgow.” – I: “How did you know?” – She: “I’d remember you anywhere.” – On waking, thought I should have given her – Address or telephone number. –

Woken by the muezzin. Where else but Baghdad? The boys are running around and screaming in the covered way, little tongues shrill as whistles, brown limbs flashing like flames. The faithful are being called to prayer, and I, the faithless, to another burning day.

Planning an expedition is smoke in a water-pipe, a shimmer on the horizon, the glint in an almond eye. It is easy to see myself, in the mind’s eye, climbing the face of a dune in desert robes – I who should now be tramping, in the flesh, through the rocky defiles of Luristan.

The first real lead so far was at the party I attended last night, the British at their least reserved. I got into conversation with the wife of some embassy official [horse-faced woman with a braying laugh], and soon found myself being introduced around as a “terribly clever young man.”

One or two of them seemed to know what I was talking about when I began to talk of the road to Turkestan, and I ended at last with some names and addresses of “people who might help.” “You need to join one of the regular caravans,” said one. “There are no regular caravans at this time of year,” riposted another. “Much better to conscript a guide and travel with his people.”

It ended where I thought it would. No-one knew of a suitable guide, for a destination so far-off, so fraught with peril: Persia, the Caucasus, and the shores of the Caspian sea. “You’ll get yourself shot if you go anywhere near the Bolshevik oil fields.” Some of them promised to keep an eye open, however.

•

21

2008-01-29T08:31:00.000+13:00

striations in the white. You have put up a picture on the wall, there, of a snowy lake. It is yours and not Ann’s because it reflects your taste in colours – blues and pale shades.” He thought it best not to mention that he could detect her fingerprints in the glossy paper, having compared them with the ones left on the glass she had been drinking out of. “There are 973 rivets in this room, and eighty-nine strips of steel …”

“Okay, okay, enough already,” broke in Ann. “But what does all that tell you, anyway? It’s just details, really.”

“No, it tells me that the two of you are lovers, that you are not concerned to hide the fact, that you are happier with conditions here than Julie is …”

“Anyone could have guessed that.”

“That you are afraid of losing her, that she is afraid of losing you, that neither of you are aware that it is this fear which is making things difficult for both of you, that both of you would like to talk about it, but are afraid that that might mean the end for you, that you feel you cannot leave and she feels she cannot stay …” He stopped.

The two girls were staring at him as if at a black magician. They turned, then, to one another and laughed.

“He’s right!”

“Me too!”

“Look … George. You are going to keep all this to yourself, aren’t you? I mean, there can’t be many secrets when you’re around.”

“You are my friends. I will never betray my friends.”

“Friends … but, look, we just met.”

“Apologies.” With the scanning apparatus suspended, speech again became difficult. “I know you so well I think of you as friends, and would like to help you anyway – in any way. I have no … reserve? I cannot dissimulate. Since I met you I am interested only in you.”

Breaking the somewhat embarrassed silence, Julie asked, “Where’s he going to sleep?” Then blushed a little at the implications of what she had said.

“I don’t sleep.”

“You don’t? But … what do you …”

“Do instead, were you going to ask, Jules?” broke in the more level-headed Ann. “Is there anything we can do for you, then, George? You know, like I said before, coffee, tea, breakfast.”

“Nothing, thank you, Ann. I am all right. I will be all right.”

22

2008-01-29T08:29:00.000+13:00

They stand, uncomfortable. The table is overflowing, as usual, with papers and the detritus of breakfast (it is approximately 10.35 a.m.). You move back to clear two chairs for them, which they deign, doubtfully, to occupy.

Now that you have them here you wonder what to do with them. The girl is young and pretty, but (let’s face it) a Christian, and probably connected with the boy. He looks (at least on superficial indications) to be quite probably a dork.

“So what did you want to tell me about?” you ask, returning them the initiative.

“Oh, well, we’re here to talk to you about the Lord Jesus and …”

“Yes, I kind of gathered that. But who are you? Why are you here, now, talking to me?”

“Well, our church sends out volunteers to witness in this area …”

“You’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, are you?”

“No, we’re not.” He sounds quite indignant. “We’re from the Christian Fellowship, just over the hill from here.”

“What about you?” you ask, turning to the girl. “What are you here for?”

Your tone of aggression obviously perturbs her. She was coasting along quite nicely, thank you, on the wings of her companion’s eloquence, but is now forced rudely back into the conversation. How much more comfortable to be a critic of others’ efforts!

“I’m … like him.”

“What’s your name?”

“Judy.”

Blondie reasserts control. “I’m Philip.” Putting out a brawny hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

You shake the hand: “Bruno, Giordano Bruno. You can call me Jordan, though, for short. You know, like the river.”

“Jordan?”

“Precisely.”

“Nice to meet you, Jordan.”

“Well, now, Judy and Philip, so you’re going to tell me about the wonders of your faith, are you? Convince me to accept the Lord Jesus Christ into my life as my personal saviour?”

“Look, would you rather we left? I mean …”

23

2008-01-29T08:28:00.000+13:00

The Ram

The taste was salty, a little sweat mixed with the secreted tartness of the juices: more grapefruit than honey. Folds of texture demanded separate exploration – exploitation? – as did the springy mattress of coiled hairs, dark, sparse but still an important contributor to the overall sensory mélange. It was at once the most active and most passive of activities: active, because it demanded the use of facial muscles seldom consulted otherwise, save for a moue or a grimace; passive, because his body took no further part in it than that.

“That’s good. Don’t stop …”

He had almost forgotten the other witness, which was odd, as it was her wishes only he had meant to consult. Looking up, he saw her face looking down at him, complacency mixed, he felt, with a certain anxiety. His tongue probed further, encountering, in its passage, a small raised dot of flesh above the junction of the two sliced halves. At once, and with little warning, the taste came sharper, more urgent. A gasp came from above, and she pressed herself at him with no lingering reserve. The tongue flicked on, pendulum-like, as he paid minute attention to the reactions it inspired.

For a while he investigated the slippery bridge of flesh which joined her slit to the starfish hole behind. This appeared to please her also, though she resisted a little his attempts to probe the latter more deeply. In any case, the posture she was in, on her back, thighs apart, on the edge of the bunk, precluded the possibility of proper entry.

“More … uh. Up above … yes! Don’t stop.”

Her coaching continued with less and less precision as he returned to his original position. At length, after a good ten minutes or so, she gave a little buck and gasp, and subsided. He took that as his signal to cease.

Every minute detail of the room was, of course, registered in his mind, and he began to sort them idly according to origin. This sheet-fabric-crease was Ann’s, the result of a less than peaceful night; this odd sock was Julie’s, torn off just now as she hastily bared her lower half to facilitate the activity they had just enjoyed. He supposed that she had enjoyed it. So, really, had he, though she was now beginning to rouse from her lethargy and look down at him with a certain anxiety. With surprise, he realised that it was only now she had begun to wonder what services he might demand in exchange for this one.

24

2008-01-29T08:26:00.000+13:00

“No, no, no, Philip, please forgive my brusquerie. I’m quite willing to hear what you’ve got to tell me, just as long as you do me the courtesy of listening to me in turn.”

“What’s that?” asks Judy, unexpectedly.

“What’s what?”

“That word. Brusquerie.”

“Oh, a rude or unpolished manner, lack of finesse in one’s conversation … something like that.”

“Are you a teacher?”

“Well, I suppose I am, sort of. I’ve got a brother who’s a musician, and another one who’s a boxer: Pete and Frank.”

They exchange more glances. Clearly they’ve been warned against teachers – or was it intellectuals in general? Unrewarding to talk to, improbable as converts, and always full of lengthy provisos … seed that fell on the waste ground, for the most part.

“Well,” Philip doggedly resumes the scent. “We’re here to talk to you about our personal experience of the Lord Jesus …”

“What was it, then? Tell me about your personal experience of him. Did he come to you in the form of a blinding light, which only left you in the city of Damascus? Did you meet him as a traveller on the road to Emmaus? Or is he just a voice whispering in your head? What’s he saying now?”

“Look, mate …” Philip is going to lose his cool in a moment, so Judy sees this as her moment to intervene.

“I hear him talking to me sometimes.”

“Do you indeed? Tell me about it.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I just hear him.”

“Words forming in your head out of nowhere? Or is it an actual tone of voice that you recognise?”

“I know it’s him.”

“But how do you know? Is it because of the things he says to you?”

“I guess so, yes.”

“What’s he telling you now, right now, about me?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t happen very often, you know.”

“Couldn’t you ask him? You know, a word or two of advice?”

“Of course. Would you like to pray with us?”

“You know, I might just do that – but only if he tells you something you can pass on to me. You see, I really do need some advice here.”

25

2008-01-29T08:24:00.000+13:00

“I’m sorry, Ann. I would have done the same for you, only Julie was here and you weren’t. I love you both, but you understand that I want nothing in return.”

“But look, you dumb shit, don’t you understand that you can’t just go around licking out ladies like an icecream cone or a lollypop – that it’s got implications for us?”

“But Ann, that’s just it … that’s just what …”

“Shut up, you fucking little slut – just get the fuck out of here, both of you. I want to think.”

Julie was now occupied in trying to retrieve her panties (the only other garment, besides socks, she was in the habit of wearing around the apartment) from wherever they had got to. Seeing them in the far corner into which they had been flung, Bruno went over to retrieve them, and handed them to her. She took them, then ran out in a flood of tears.

“No, you stay. We’ve got to talk.”

“Certainly, Ann.”

“How can you be so fucking cold about it? I mean, this is probably it for me and her, and I’ve been trying for I don’t know how long to stop this from happening. I always knew she liked men, but I thought that if …”

“But Ann, Julie loves you still.”

“So what about this? Was this a way of proving it to me? Hey, Ann, guess what Bruno and I got up to this afternoon?”

“I’m sorry, Ann. As I explained to Julie earlier, I do not really understand. I remember something of what I used to feel, and I remember that my … lover used to enjoy that act, as did I. Julie was bored, and did not want to talk to me, so I asked her if she would like me to do this for her.”

“Call it by its name. You asked if she wanted her pussy eaten, and of course the little slut said yes. She always does. How much time do you think I’ve spent with my head where yours has just been, contributing to madam’s pleasure?”

“I had forgotten the names. Some are there still, but not easy to recover: Cunt, snatch, pussy, slit, vagina, honeypot – it is more bitter than that, more citric – peach, fanny, crack, vulva …”

“Oh just shut up you fucking robot. I suppose you’d like to eat me out now to make it all even?”

“Yes, Ann.”

26

2008-01-29T08:23:00.000+13:00

I was getting ready to go out when I heard raised voices in the narrow alley outside the house (trust psychoanalysis to give me the right associations with dark alleys and narrowness). The woman of the house, my landlady (or concierge), was quarrelling with somebody else, a young man by the sound of it. They were talking too fast for me to make out much of the conversation, but it seemed to concern the right time to come calling.

I thought little of it. Many people come to this quarter looking for rooms, but after a brief interval, I heard a knock on my door and some whining words from the servant (an oppressed looking black who cringes instinctively every time he looks at you). I gathered that I had a visitor, and that they were just checking I was fit to receive guests.

Hastily tidying away my accumulation of papers, I signified assent to the invasion, and the procession of man of the house, woman of the house, and young robed and booted visitor began to sidle in.

I motioned to them to sit down, which they did, and then clapped my hands and ordered refreshments from the wretched servant. As he bustled off to fill a tray with dusty pastries and half-stewed coffee, we began to exchange small-talk about the weather (hot), the conditions for trade (bad), and the prospects of amelioration for either (small).

All through this rigmarole I was sizing up my guest, who was dressed as if for desert travel, with a full headdress wrapped around the face. His part in the conversation was confined mainly to assent with my landlord’s views, but I could see his eyes – large, lustrous, brown – were fixed on me as if sizing me up. Haunting eyes, really, but then so many of them are when framed with the dark blue of the burnoose.

When the coffee came, and the ritual exchanges were completed, my landlord began to offer hints that it might be time to come to the object of this visit, and our guest began to speak with an absence of circumlocution attributable (I fear) only to his youth.

“You wish to travel to the north, I hear.”

“Yes.”

“I can guide you there. My home is in the mountains.”

“Really? You know that I wish to go quite far?”

“I do not care how far.”

“What payment would you require?”

I had little faith in the negotiations; they seemed to me like many I had been through before. Soon would come the “but” – the demand that we go in

27

2008-01-29T08:22:00.000+13:00

“Can we help?” intervenes Philip, positively unctuous with concern.

“You’re both kind of young. I think he’d probably be in a better position to advise me, what with those forty days in the wilderness and three days down in hell.”

Philip would clearly like to know if you’re having them on, but knows it’s against the rules to ask. Julie seems to be enjoying her new-found spiritual authority as Mouthpiece of God. She takes your hand, then Philip’s, closes her eyes, and intones, “Let us pray.”

GOD

BOY

28

2008-01-29T08:20:00.000+13:00

“So anyway, what I’m saying is that you can stay here, too, and it needn’t mean a court-martial for dereliction of duty.”

“Thank you. Both of you.”

“You’re very welcome, I’m sure. Now, your first job is to apply some more cold compresses to Madam’s sore behind, but for that you’d better go into the next room. I’ve got some work to do on the link.”

“Please, not too hard …” murmured Julie a few minutes later as her bare bottom lay before him on the bed, seeming to invite caresses of a more substantial kind than those provided by tongue and soft, wet towel.

•

“What I don’t quite understand is what you were sent here for in the first place, if you don’t have any work assignment and no-one’s ever heard of you on the link.”

It was strange to lie in a bed again, holding and being held by a girl. Julie had gone to sleep, and was snoring off to one side, but Ann was still awake and curious, and interested in more than sex, it seemed.

“Neither do I.”

“And the way you speak, too. It’s a bit like a foreigner with a good vocabulary but a lot of gaps in his knowledge. Why did they make you like that?”

Releasing the smooth bare body which he had been caressing with such reminiscent devotion, he rolled on his back and stared at the ceiling. At this the sleeping Julie gave a grunt and pushed herself back against him. On one side, then, her delicate backside pressed against his leg; on the other, Ann’s lithe inner thigh and breast were nestled up against him. It was a kind of paradise, a dream of love and contentment – physical and emotional – perfect in all ways. And yet he could not sleep.

“Ann. Do you mind if I tell you something? It will take time.”

“How much time? I mean, you can go ahead, but I’m so comfortable right now that I can’t really promise to …”

“That is all right. You do not have to stay awake. I will feel you against me, and lie here till morning.”

“God, it’s all so melodramatic in your world, isn’t it?” She stretched up and gave him a smacking kiss on the mouth, followed by one on the ear. He did not react except to continue stroking her like a cat. She purred.

29

2008-01-29T08:19:00.000+13:00

The Heart of the Snow

No-one was guilty of an elaborate toilet, water being a scarce commodity. There were adherents of the snow-wash theory, but these belonged to an earlier and warmer epoch of our history … Laurence tried an early morning bath which was the last voluntary dip attempted by anyone.

Their bodies look so white as they rub them down with snow. The faces, hands, rough, brown with weather, work – wrinkled as mummies; but their limbs are pure and smooth as alabaster. There is a little party of four or five who run out every week or so into the wind to cleanse their limbs with cold fingers of snow. Since my immersion in the bay, I have felt no temptation to join them.

It was necessary, of course – the packing case had to be recovered, and you cannot ask a man to do what you will not do yourself. I stripped off all my clothes (God knows that was hard enough in itself), and trod gingerly down to the shore. Then plunged in, as fast as I could.

The water burned like liquid fire. It was so cold I was almost beyond feeling – layers and layers of compression and pain. I had thought that I would be numb in an instant, but there is a numbing pain within the numbness, and a greater pain, an agony of the larger organs, within that. I was at full stretch to reach that wretched case, cursing as hard as I could to keep my brain alive, language the enemy of ice. Oh, and when I put my head under I thought it would explode, blood rushing to every corner of the skin to buoy it up against this unheard-of enemy. I reached the slippery bottom – a moment’s panic before I grasped the case (which I had located already with my feet), then a mighty pull up to the waiting hands above. Some of them seized hold of me and pulled me up. And then I was being rubbed down with rough towels, and brandy in the mouth, and I was putting my clothes on as fast as I ever have, faster than with that whore in Melbourne, faster than on the morning I woke up too late for my biology final.

It was the wrong packing case, of course.

Afterwards, my teeth rattled so that I thought they would never stop, that they would ricochet out of my head and keep chattering along the ground. My head felt swollen to bursting point, and ached for hours afterwards, while my

30

2008-01-29T08:18:00.000+13:00

the wrong direction, or be back by a fixed time, the unrealistic arrangements for remuneration. As the conversation continued, though, in this direct and straightforward way, I began to feel again the excitement which had brought me here, to the Middle East, to explore the ruins of this ancient world. Was it possible I might succeed after all?

Horses. Equipment. Food. No camp-followers required – no wife, no servants, no guards. Was it possible he was a bandit, intending to march a few miles out into the countryside before killing me and stripping my body? Quite probable on the surface, but somehow, looking at those eyes, I could not believe it. This was someone who meant what he said.

He had heard of my plight from a servant of one of the British officials I had been talking to the night before, and saw this as a fortunate coincidence of aims. He wished to return to his native regions, and desired little profit beyond that required to cover his own travelling expenses. Secretly determining to reward him far beyond these modest claims if our travels came to anything, I shook hands with him to settle the bargain.

His hand was cool and soft, lacking the leathery consistency of the true desert dweller. What I noticed most about it, though, was the long ridged scar which ran across it like a trench. A straight razor cut which must have gone very deep indeed.

31

2008-01-28T10:20:00.007+13:00

Clubbing

Quand je suis dans une chambre obscure, je me plais infiniment à voir au travers d’une fenêtre un immense horizon vis-à-vis de moi
– Giacomo Casanova, Mémoires écrits par lui-même

Approaching the window, your eyes are transfixed by a square of glass on which you read these words, traced with the point of a diamond: «tu oublieras Henriette.» You will forget Henriette. Eight dusty rust-red volumes of nineteenth-century French. How many hundred pages to get to Henriette?

It’s awkward ducking into the club. One minute you’re walking along the street, the soul of discretion, the next you’re the whole of perversion in the eyes of passers-by. Alas. But no such considerations influence the two large bouncers standing on the mirrored floors. Your loose possessions are tabulated, a pass is issued, and the next step is within.

Me rappelant à l’instant le moment où Henriette m’avait écrit ces paroles treize ans plus tôt, je sentis mes cheveux se dresser sur ma tête. Recalling the moment Henriette wrote these words so many years before, I felt the hairs stand up on my head.

The glass between the foyer and the interior of the club is opaque, seamless, uninscribed.

It takes time to acclimatise to the strobes, the dazzling screens, the smoky atmosphere. A drink must be acquired. The barmaid is dressed in a yellow halter and scanty thong. She is pleasant enough looking, but the thong looks painfully tight and out of place. Her voice is high-pitched, childish. The money issued is poorly printed paper, good only for in here. It can be exchanged later, outside, in the real world, for legal tender.

If you sit right at the tongue of the stage, the performance is more intensely there. To one side, at the higher tables, it is a matter of contemplation. And a bare-breasted girl is already dancing, strutting, gyrating there, to remixed versions of the latest hits.

Her thong is soon pulled down, and – naked save for her platform soles – she begins to make her round of the tables. As she comes closer, the faint goose-pimples, the pallor of her flesh convince one that she is, in fact, real – that this is no illusion. There is indeed a naked girl right there in front, albeit

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“I’m looking for something, I know.”

“Aren’t we all? Love, peace, security …”

“No, it is what I am here for – looking for something. That is what I was programmed for, and that is why I have … gaps. They knew I would meet people and talk to them, so they had to make it so there was nothing to fear – so that I could tell them nothing. They sent me to the wheel to watch and lie low …”

“Well, you’re certainly doing that all right. You couldn’t get much lower than what you’ve been getting up to with Julie the moment my back’s turned.”

“Your back is lovely. I would gladly do the same to you with your back turned.”

“Hey, that was a joke! My God, you’re really coming out of your shell, aren’t you! Nah, it’s not my scene, all that anal stuff. Thanks for the compliment, though. Actually, while we’re on the subject, which one of us do you find prettier?”

“You.”

“You’re so direct. You should say something like, “You’re both gorgeous, but Julie is more … such and such, and you’re more … so and so, and I really couldn’t choose between you. The two of you make up such a smorgasbord of delights that I can’t define where my pleasure really …”

“Ann. What are you talking about?”

“Sorry. This is how I get. You know I don’t chatter normally, but in bed, after sex, I get terribly talkative. Julie just goes to sleep on me, but you’re the first lover I’ve ever had who didn’t just turn over and start snoring. You see, I love all the foreplay and fooling around, but it’s this part that I really like, and I never get enough of it. Actually, I think I mostly have sex in order to feel like this afterwards. You don’t mind, do you?”

“I don’t mind. I will hold you forever if you want me to.”

“You really mean that, don’t you?”

“I cannot dissimulate, I told you before. It is true. No, I think it is true; I cannot really know anymore.”

“Do you like having Julie rubbing up against you over there?”

“Yes.”

“She’s sweet, isn’t she? She can be such a bitch sometimes, but in bed she’s like a little fieldmouse, full of tricks and so cute when she rolls up into a ball and falls asleep. I love her so much. Do you think it’s strange that I’m sharing her with you like this?”

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breathing was as compacted as on a high mountain peak – Erebus, with the Prof. After that, every time I scratched myself and dreamed of a hot bath and clean towels, I thought of the slimy waters of the bay – that anti-creation of the cold – and contented myself with my warm bag.

Their limbs are so white, though, as they frolic and horseplay in the snow. Laurence is prancing about like a schoolboy – he practically is a schoolboy; a clean-limbed lad fresh out from England. The older Swiss, Filippo, tries to match him, such Alpine intensity in his determination to be merry and sportive. Can’t they see that it is too cold for that? They don’t seem to care, shrunken pricks bouncing around between their legs as they swing their arms to and fro, embracing the wind as a lover.

Funny, really, these pashes that grow up down here – as at a girl’s boarding school. Those two are friends beyond all expectation. One young, impetuous, the other gnarled and worldly wise. What do they find to talk about? Once I overheard Laurence trying out his Italian on the older man– something about la tua mano è gelida – and the other laughing that deep, troll-like guffaw of his, half-swallowed in the throat, a kind of ghostly chuckle echoing from caverns below. A crevasse laugh. Laurence was ashamed and took some time to come round after that. I notice these things, must do, for the good of the expedition.

I think that these should be the two who come with me on the inland run. The main reason is the fact that they know the dogs so much better than anyone else, having come out with them on the outward voyage, but it is also because there is something fascinating in their absorption with each other – a kind of strength which I think will buoy us up when we reach the plateau.

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Artist

I met him, I suppose, at a party. An older artist – sculptor, perhaps. Grey-haired, distinguished. In any case, I see myself at his long wooden house, in a cold green garden, out in the banlieues. He shows me around: oak-panelled rooms, numbered engravings … the conversation is in French.

I stay for lunch. He is very friendly. At some point he kisses me. Though essentially unattracted, I am in a sense relieved. At least it convinces me his interest is sincere, not mere politeness to a guest. After that, he squires me about. His reputation is worldwide, it seems, and his celebrity guarantees a good time.

I don’t see much beyond that. Do I sleep with him? Perhaps. At any rate, there is a civilised rapprochement between us …

[I must admit, the coldness and venality of this dream worries me. It’s true I feel no revulsion, in the dream, against the older man, but there is no sincere attachment either. Is it telling me to relax, accept the complexity of my feelings, give up the dream of fame, true love? Or am I in some sense the artist figure as well, doomed to disappointment in the objects of my affection?]

My days are now absorbing. We walk, or ride, through a constantly changing landscape, while I muse on what I hope to achieve from this strange quest. Knowledge? There is an element of genuine curiosity about these relics of the past. Celebrity? Perhaps not alien to me, if the dream is anything to go by. Excitement? That, perhaps, most of all. Or rather, if not excitement, at least the fending off and abeyance of boredom.

My companion fascinates me. He treats me with the strictest courtesy, yet rejects my attempts at conversation with scarcely an attempt at reply. I should like to discuss his family, origins, reasons for undertaking this trip, but all such attempts he evades with silence. The only thing we do discuss is (each morning) the route we are to follow that day; and (occasionally) the food.

He is strict in his observance of prayers, but very private about his ablutions. I have seen the scar, and speculated on it (it runs the length of his arm, and down across the wrist – clearly a life-threatening wound). Oddly enough, there are no stitch marks on it. It’s hard to believe that such a wound could be survived, so far from the hygiene and sterility of modern hospitals.

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ACT II: Setting Sail

• Scene [Survivors (Friday 6/11, c. 5.10 a.m.)]

Voices are heard over the darkened, sea-washed screen – “Got him … got him … there” – there is a sense of upheaval and movement upwards as the light begins to break through water, and we see the lifeboat loom up large above us. Angus and Tiny are leaning over the side, with the boat-hook propped between them. Their outstretched hands are hoisting us out of the sea, we feel.

Now we are dangling over the side, as they continue to heave and rest, heave and rest. We can see the crowded deck, the bundled-up sails and provisions, and – directly below us – the face of Bob, with splinted-up back and bandaged hands, now mercifully sunk into fitful sleep.

The proximity seems too extreme, somehow, and we are just beginning to say to ourselves: “No, watch out,” when a last heave topples us up over the side and crashes us down onto the injured man. His animal cry of pain breaks the spell, and the camera-angle shifts to a WIDE-ANGLE of the little group of labouring sailors.

“Ahoy there!”

A hailing voice is heard off to one side, and the sailors all turn to see another boat moving swiftly towards them. There is already a jury-rigged sail on it, and a certain air of briskness and efficiency in its approach.

“Ahoy there! Who’s in charge?”

Now we can see an officer speaking through a loud-hailer.

Angus at once begins to shake the man who has just been hoisted into the boat. “Mr. Britt, sir, Mr. Britt, the Captain wants to speak to you, sir.”

“Very well, Mr …” Britt looks at Angus with a disoriented, forgetful expression.

“Macdonald, sir.”

“Mr Macdonald, tell him I’ll be with him in a minute.”

• Scene [Sailing (Saturday 7/11, c. 7.30 a.m.)]

“With all due respect, sir, wouldn’t it be easier to make for the coast …”

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with a drugged expression and a resolute eschewal of eye contact. No-one rewards her. She is not, it appears, to their taste. The parade of flesh continues, as the spectators look on with somehow forced intensity.

It is early afternoon, surely a dead time in most days, yet the club is timeless. The room will no doubt fill up as evening approaches, the dancers become more frenetic, but the essential tone, the simplicity of the transaction is already established.

The next dancer, a blonde, is different. From the first the splendid youthful perfection and energy of her body somehow lift her out of the ruck of tedium. Her face is not beautiful but pretty, with a childish smile and waves in her long blonde hair. Something about her says Westie – a child of those distant, bush-clad suburbs. How old is she? Nineteen, twenty-two? Her curves are plumped out with baby fat, though her limbs are toned.

Her skill is based on athleticism rather than grace, but her command of the basic steps still looks fresh. Though clearly no beginner, can she have been doing this for more than a very few weeks to be so confident, so free?

As more and more of her body is revealed, its true unspoiled beauty becomes apparent. For the first time it is impossible to believe that she will go the whole way, expose herself entirely, but her pubes, too, are shaved bare, and she gropes herself with the same machine-like enthusiasm as the other girls.

Somehow you cannot bear it when she descends from the stage and begins to parade about the tables. She turns and (yes) literally rubs her back against the fat pony-tailed man beside you. Dieu, que les femmes sont belles. Her bottom, her back are so lovely, so soft, so unprotected. Touching them would be such unspeakable joy.

Instead, she climbs the column beside you and, gripping it with her powerful thighs, leans back and hangs in mid-air from it. The audience, prompted by some managerial claque, ventures half-hearted applause at this, and she climbs down – satisfied at having provoked at least this much reaction?

Leaning backwards from the pole, the slim perfection of her waist was evident. She is not flawless, but as close to it as flesh can really sustain. “This is how we party,” the song hypnotically insists. She goes off to a scattering of applause.

All this time you have been watching with interest a slim young dark-haired girl in a short skirt and top chatting to a man in front of you. The flanges of

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“Sorry, Mr. Britt. St. Helena’s the nearest land, and that’s where we’re going.”

“Yes, sir. The women and children …”

“The children can come with us. We’ve got the bigger boat, and they’ll be safer here. You’ll have to keep the women and wounded you’ve already got, though.”

“We haven’t much space, sir …”

“I can see that, man. Neither have we. Needs must, you know. So long as you can keep your sails up and make a steady few miles a day you’ll be fine. Try to keep up with us for as long as you can. Anything else?”

“Well, sir, the rudder’s not too good, and we seem to have sprung a few leaks already, and the water supply …”

“Good God, man, you’ll have to make do. We’ll all have to make do. We’ve got to go. The wind’s getting up. We’ll speak again …”

All through this conversation between Captain Rogerson (brisk, brusque, brown-bearded, impatient) and Mr. Britt (short, clean-shaven, with a harried, clerk-like face), leaning over the gunwales of their respective boats, a constant traffic of people and goods has been going on. Children have been lifted over into the Captain’s boat – with a certain amount of crying and protest, muted by cold and tiredness – and a few adults have moved to take their places. Water casks have gone to and fro, along with canvas, tools, and various other necessities of the voyage. Britt’s face says all we need to know about how desperate a venture this is; but the Captain is determined to be off just as soon as minimum provision has been made.

There is some half-hearted waving as the larger boat sails off, mainly from the children, but the sailors and few able-bodied men: Angus, Tiny and the others, including an old Lascar, are too busy rigging a mast to turn around.

• Scene [The Speech (Saturday 7/11, c. 9.30 a.m.)]

The other boat is still visible, cutting along in the water. We can hear the creak of the wind in the rigging, and the people are grouped as comfortably as they can be: Bob Ironside has been laid down flat in the sternsheets of the boat, Miss Taggart, a stewardess, in the bows. All the others are crowded around them.

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Diva

Not Diva, deva, no. Not v. The w is perhaps the only letter in our Roman alphabet to which it can be compared. In Arabic script, however, there is that continuous up and down of the linked letters, with dots like little dimples above the upstrokes. A nation of pederasts? “Across the river there’s a boy with a bottom like a peach, but alas, I cannot swim.” Those dark ovals, like a rounded w, bisected by a golden stream of piss.

I followed him, you see. I shouldn’t have, I know that, but I was curious to see where he went, so privately – not even prayers need be so private. But then, I didn’t really anyway, because it was a he whom I followed, and a she who was revealed by that act of squatting down and hoisting aside the robe.

It is, of course, the Muslim method, devised to avoid soiling clean clothes, I suppose, so I thought nothing of it at first except shame at spying. But this was no boy’s behind, nor did it back upon a gelding’s mound. How, with her back towards me, could I be so sure? I spy with my little eye, or rather, with my little binocular eye-glasses, something beginning with “p” – pee – and “c,” and indeed I was all at sea at the sight.

Why did I have to keep watching? Y? (But that’s the front, with the little triangle and two pressed-together legs). It was unspeakably fascinating to watch her wipe herself, then rearrange her costume to become again my slight sheikh of the desert. Those almond eyes, smooth brows, that mellifluous voice, all were now explained to me.

I had stiffened at the sight. Yes, like a bar, an I, and with an eye at one end, which I had perforce to take in hand and rub, up, down, blood-glistening, until I wrote my praise of unity in the sand, in three long narrow strokes, with a little swirl at the end. I felt so animal, abandoned – the freedom of a dream.

Discreetly, of course, I said nothing of it to her later.

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As usual the food ration was reduced. This caused us to have more than ordinarily vivid dreams. I happened to be awake one night when Laurence was sledging in imagination, vociferously shouting, “Hike, hike,” to the dogs.

Last night I had the strangest dream so far. The last crevasse Laurence fell into was the deepest to date. He was roped to the sledge, but it took us quite some time to get him up onto the surface, and by then he was chilled to the bone. Even out in the wind on the lip of the precipice we were better off – constant activity does that for you. Down there, though, he suffered that death of the extremities that comes from inanition.

We put up the tent and stripped him off, and Filippo climbed into his bag with him. The two bodies were as close as lovers, and all of a sudden I felt jealous. I wanted to be in there with him, holding his white limbs close; the Swiss seemed to me to be an interloper. Of course I said nothing. What was there to say? There is no beastliness between the two of them, I feel sure of that – else they would be more guarded, less open in their affection. The beastliness is all in my head.

I lay awake for some time, listening to the wind, which is unusual for me, for any of us. Normally we are asleep as soon as the bags become truly warm. I lay there, as I say, and after a time I thought I heard a voice outside the tent. I looked over at the other two, but they were fast asleep in each other’s arms.

I could not distinguish words, but it sounded like a woman’s voice. Still in my bag, I crawled over to the flap. We lace it very firm, so it took me a little time to get the knots disentangled. I looked out – it was light, but I could see nothing: just the whistling arrows of wind polishing the snow-scales.

The next thing, I was outside the tent. The voice was no longer audible, but I was walking through the drifts, somehow unaffected by the wind. By now I knew it was a dream, but my curiosity had begun to grow; I felt there was something to discover there about our expedition. Something of the greatest importance. I looked down to see that I was dressed only in trousers and shirt, but I felt no cold. I was as free and natural as on a summer’s day at home.

On and on I walked in the bright slanted sunlight, the visibility better than I have ever seen it on this godforsaken stretch of coast, until I saw a black mark appear in the distance. Shackleton, I thought. He’s made it at last. I could

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her hips are decorated with tattooed wings, and frame a svelte and lovely waist. What is she doing here, you wonder. Do men come in here with their girlfriends pour les allumer, to turn them on for later?

Now she finishes her drink and walks quickly over to the little door that leads backstage. Is she too a dancer? It appears that she must be. In that case, is such fraternisation in their terms of employment?

You are still an outside observer here, unfamiliar with the rules, but everyone knows it is forbidden to touch. The next girl, with vibrant milk-chocolate skin, is as perfect as any catwalk model, and bares her limbs with pride. Her dance is accompanied by another girl, dark also, with a sweet smile but a slightly protuberant stomach. The display seems less erotic than cruel – setting the petty imperfections of the one against the radiance of the other.

You scan them half-abstractedly, however, as the blonde has walked back into the room, in a white negligée which emphasises the essential – what? … innocence? purity? perhaps the only conceivable word is “chastity” – of her demeanour. You watch her as she moves to the back of the room.

•

I have gret wonder, be this lyght,
How that I lyve, for day ne nyght
I may nat slepe wel nygh noght;
I have so many an ydel thoght
Purely for defaut of slep

“Can I buy you a drink?”

[Smile] It is a pretty smile, and one which appears to denote assent.

“What would you like?”

She would, it seems, like a bourbon and coke. The barmaid is far from prompt, and seems to tender change with a little look of disapproval, which may mean that such gestures are not to be encouraged, but what’s there to lose?

“I guess you have to watch out what you eat and drink, as a dancer, I mean.”

She shrugs, looking already a little bored. Accepts the drink.

“I’m a teacher myself. I teach languages.”

You feel a momentary qualm at thus blowing your cover, but it is hard to

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Siren

This could be …
underwater love

[I was dreaming of mermaids, gathering around my half-drowned body, pulling at my clothes, blonde, fishy, exquisite in their tight-spun scales. All the while, that hypnotic, slightly absurd voice in the background intoning breathily in English and Portuguese. Why Portuguese?]

I wake to find her bending over me. It’s hard to see my companion now as anything but man in daylight, when we ride together, and shoot game, and jingle our spurs. At night, I cannot but think of the woman within the robes. I have seen the skill with which she wields that knife, though, and heard a tale or two of the females of her race. I fear that I might lose more than my pride were I to approach her unbidden. And yet she continues to fascinate.

Last night we were talking beside the camp-fire. She was curious to know what I hoped to find in this barren wasteland, and I tried to tell her of the treasures of Turkestan. When she heard the treasures were old books and scrolls, however, her interest somewhat abated. I boasted a little of the fame and fortune such finds could achieve, which brought her attention back for a while. Then she excused herself to sleep.

That is the sleep I have now interrupted: “You dream. You dream too much. Is it a good dream this time?”

“I don’t know,” I reply, still half in the grip of those fishy hands and bodies. “It was of sirens, mermaids – do you know what I mean?”

“I have never seen the sea, or its people either.”

“Oh well, no-one’s ever seen mermaids. They’re not real, you know: except in dreams.”

“And what do they do with you in the dream that you turn and cry out so much?”

“They wish to drown me.”

“They are evil, then, evil spirits of some kind?”

“I don’t know if they’re evil, but they try to drown sailors, certainly.”

“Is it not evil to kill without cause?”

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almost see the Boss in front of me, but then the mist blew in and I was cut off from view.

I stopped, for I know how futile it is to walk in the fog, and saw without surprise that there were little flowers around my feet, little yellow flowers; and there was a naked girl lying among them. It was she, again, of course – but now the long red scar was gone, replaced by unblemished skin.

“Do you know me?” she asked, and it was the voice I had been hearing, the voice which had summoned me from the tent. “Yes, I know you,” I replied; and at that moment it was true. I knew who she was, and what she was doing there, though I seem to have forgotten it again now. “Come and join me,” she said, and I was kissing her, kissing her beautiful red lips, pale with cold, holding her lissom body in my arms. I was fucking her, fucking her long and hard – not like in Melbourne, but with a perfection of pleasure.

And then I realised it was Laurence I was holding so hard, whose smooth young boy’s body I was caressing, whose lips were fixed to mine. It seemed perfect to me. For that moment I was an animal, not a man: we were two seals, swimming in the translucent cathedral of the ice; we were terns, spiralling above the ice-floes. I drove in and out of him as the girl’s voice kept whispering in my ear, “This is the Heart of the Snow; this is the home you have been seeking.”

And I was back again.

It didn’t seem like a dream, but real. When I woke up back in my bag, I was convinced that I had been outside, and in fact got up to check that the ties were really closed. The other two were sleeping just as I had left them, and there were no voices.

Such visions are natural enough. We never speak of it, but quite often during the day I am sure that there is someone else with us, usually the girl, but sometimes a more shadowy figure. I had not been consciously thinking of Shackleton, but of course he is always more or less in my mind.

As for the transformation of the girl into young Laurence, I think it would be wrong to place too much stock in it. So far from women, it is natural that I should feel strange. The same has happened with me on the sporting field before, but it means no more than that – rough comradeship, mutual esteem and affection. I refuse to see it as more than that.

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For I have felynge in nothing
But as yt were a mased thyng,
Alway in poynt to falle a-doun;
For sorwful ymagynacioun
Ys always hooly in my mynde

hard to believe that she’ll ring up and shop you. More likely, perhaps, to run into one of your own students behind the counter or up on the stage, earning tuition fees.

“Wow. Teaching. That sounds good.” Her voice is a nice one, normal and unaffected. You were afraid it might be coarse or strongly accented, thus destroying the sculptor’s perfection of her image. Of course, seated thus she looks like any other girl – for that matter she exposes not much more than any other girl in a bikini.

“Well, maybe. Have you been an exotic dancer long?”

She frowns. The tone of the meeting freezes a little.

“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to get you to talk about anything that you don’t want to discuss, it’s just that you seem a nice person, and I’d like to talk to you for a bit.”

“Did you like my dancing?”

“Well, yes, I did, very much. You’re awfully good at some of those gymnastic things you do – leaning over backwards and so on.”

“Do you think I look good?”

“I think you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

“Do you have a light?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t smoke.”

But you go and get a light from the girl behind the bar. When you return the blonde has disappeared.

•

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Dark Depths

Filippo on the rear sledge could just make out Laurence walking alongside the front sledge seen dimly through the fog-like drift. He says it reminds him of a foggy day in London and pictures to himself great buildings just without the range of view.

Un soir de demi-brume à Londres
Un voyou qui ressemblait à
Mon amour …

One night of spindrift fog in London
a boyo who was the dead spit …

To die in the dark depths. I was playing with that thought, that strangely voluptuous thought, as we marched along. Anything – death, deeps, darkness – to get out of this wind. Sometimes I think I’ll walk with a stoop for the rest of my life, so accustomed have I become to that constant drag, that violence, like a body-buffet, every step of the way.

The dogs began to bark as they sensed a crevasse ahead. It was shortly after taking my noon sights, and I thought little of it, merely turning the runners sideways to present the longest transverse angle. I shouted back to Laurence to watch out, then headed on over the wind-impacted ice, that polished rink of randomness which has been collecting here since the age of the dinosaurs. Strange, really, to think that these ice-caves have been here, unchanged in all essentials, since before man walked upright on the surface of the earth. Unchanged, unseen – waiting. For what? We cannot but be the first to walk here.

Mon amour vint à mon rencontre
Et le regard qu’il me jeta
Me fit …

… of my lost leader Shackleton
came up and took a look at it

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So whan I saw I might nat slepe
Til now late this other night,
Upon my bed I sat upright
And bad oon reche me a book,
A romaunce …

“Hi!”

This time she has come right to your table. The fact that you are still here, still watching, has apparently satisfied some shibboleth for further acquaintanceship.

“Another drink?”

“Just a fruit juice. You really like to watch me dance, don’t you?”

“Well, yes, I’m afraid I do. You’re just so terribly beautiful.”

“But you like it when I bend over and flip up my negligée too, don’t you, and there’s nothing beautiful about that.”

“I do like that.”

“Are you going to stay?”

“I don’t know. Look, to be honest, what I’d really like to do is to buy you a cup of coffee, or take you out to dinner. Not necessarily tonight, but some time.”

“No, sorry.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like one of those girls who sleeps with guys.”

“I didn’t mean like that. Just a cup of coffee.”

“But you want to sleep with me, don’t you?”

“Even if I did I’m sure you’ve got a boyfriend already. I’d really be more interested in just having a talk.”

“Are you bisexual?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Most guys just want to sleep with me, not do any talking first.”

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At what? My prick?

I heard a shout from Filippo, the rear-runner, and turned my head to look. Nothing appeared amiss, but he was waving his arms and shouting. Laurence was nowhere in sight, but that was scarcely unusual. Then I bethought me of the crevasse.

Running back, having taken the precaution of quickly tethering the dogs, I found Filippo bending over a great hole in the snow. Looking down, I could see nothing save blackness, but Filippo claimed to be able to make out one of the dogs hanging from a ledge far below. The extent of the catastrophe was too great to be grasped at once, as we shouted like madmen into the dark depths.

There were echoes, but no reply. After a bit I went back to my sledge and got some rope, with which we attempted to sound the hole. There was an impediment 150 feet down, possibly the ledge which Filippo claimed to have seen. After that – nothing. The rope was not long enough to reach the bottom. Nor could we span the hole with our one remaining sledge.

Even if he had struck the ledge rather than plunging straight into the depths, Laurence could hardly have survived. We both had visions at first of our friend hanging miraculously unhurt (winded, perhaps, half-stunned) from some icy impediment, but as the minutes ticked by, we realised how unlikely it was. After an hour of shouting and sounding we paused and began to take stock.

Almost all the food was gone – our spare clothes, the main tent, the sailing tackle for the sledge, knives , spoons, cups. We were left with our sleeping-bags, the spare tent without poles, and (God be praised!) the kerosene cooker.

In one fell stroke our trip had been transformed from a surveying expedition to a desperate race for survival. I scarcely felt up to it at first, but I could see that Filippo was looking to me for direction, so I decided that after a brief reading from the burial service we should at once turn back. There was indeed no reason to linger.

As I read I fancied I heard a dog whining deep down in the black hole beneath my feet, but from first to last we heard no sound which might have been interpreted as human. So far as I can see, Laurence, young, light-footed Laurence has been literally eaten by the earth. Pluto and Persephone. He was the youngest of us, and the best. What perilous pomegranate seeds did he swallow, without thinking, to be swallowed up in his turn?

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“Yes, but it is supposed to be because they are in love with the sailors, and therefore they wish to drag them down to be with them under the sea.” This was venturing into dubious territory. I resolved to backtrack if possible, for fear of upsetting my comrade’s sensibilities. “But it is only a story.”

“And in your dream, this is what they were doing?”

“Yes, I suppose so, but I hardly remember it now. It has gone from me.”

“Did you love them, in the dream, these women?”

“I don’t know. We should not speak of it more. It was a foolish, idle dream.”

“You never speak of women. You talk of books, of fame, of money, but never love.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Are you a lover of boys, perhaps?”

“No, I’m not. I don’t wish to speak of it.”

“You have loved women, then?”

“Yes, I have loved women – or rather, one woman.” In for a penny, in for a pound. If she was curious, he could hear the story.

“I do not wish to hear of this woman. Women are vile in the eyes of God.”

“Not all women.”

“Yes, all women. I despise them. I love only men.”

“Ah.”

“But you need not fear; it is not you whom I love.”

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Me thoghte thus: that hyt was May,
And in the dawenynge I lay
(Me mette thus) in my bed al naked
And loked forth, for I was waked
With smale foules a gret hep
That had affrayed me out of my slep
Thorgh noyse and swetnesse of her song.

“Well, I’m different. It’s not that I don’t want to sleep with you, or anything like that, mind you; it’s just that I don’t really expect to get the chance.”

“I’ve got tomorrow off. If I give you my number, we could go for a coffee if you like.”

“That’d be great.”

“But now you’ve got to go. I don’t want you to watch me any more.”

•

“You look great.”

“You don’t. Didn’t you get any sleep?”

“Not really. I have a bit of trouble sleeping.”

“How’s that?”

The long afternoon passes in chatter above the coffee cups. She looks like any other pretty Auckland girl, which is (of course) what she is. The fact that you have seen her naked, performing a series of lewd movements on a smoky table in front of the leering eyes of men is neither here nor there. You, after all, were one of them.

•

“Did you enjoy that?”

“That was absolutely lovely. You’re so sweet.”

“Do you want me to do anything else for you? Suck your cock, let you fuck my arse?”

“Sorry? I don’t …”

49

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We were struck with the singular fact that, even in the height of some of these hurricanes, the sky remained serene and the sun shone brightly … The wind coming to us from the south was dry.

Filippo is getting weaker, day by day. It’s hard to describe the anxiety I feel as I watch him lacing his boots each morning, the clumsy fingers stabbing at each separate eyelet. Something has gone out of him, some virtue; some will to survive went with Laurence. He’s given up hope of return, I know.

Even when the wind is with us he stumbles blindly along in it, a calf to the shambles. Today I called an early halt, unable to bear his unsteady, shuffling progress any longer. The tent cannot be put up properly without poles, but we have devised a simple frame of ski and surveying equipment. The drill for putting it up is simple enough, but three times he let his rope fall as I crawled around fixing the pegs. I was tempted to curse him, but then I saw his face: bitter-white, as cold as winter, purple round the lips.

Inside, as we heated the hoosh, he confessed to me the agony he was suffering from friction. His under-trousers went under with the sledge, and his private parts have been rubbed almost raw by the constant swish of wet furs. I persuaded him to strip them off, and started to dab at the worst parts with vaseline and gauze.

“Lorenzo did this for me, before …”

His remark came as a surprise to me. We’ve hardly mentioned Laurence since he fell, and I had no idea that Filippo was suffering this discomfort even before the loss of the sledge. He was in delirium by now, though, and continued to mumble half to himself.

“Lorenzo, little Lorenzo. His hands were soft and cold, like the snow. His body was as white as a girl’s …”

The brute’s prick by now was starting to stand up, so I hastily ceased my ministrations and tried to steer his mind onto other things. Filippo had a great wish to see Australia and New Zealand, and I started to tell him of the green hills and hot bubbling pools we soon should visit together. In vain. I already suspected what he had to tell, but that made it no better hearing it from his lips.

“Back home, when two boys like each other, they give each other girl’s names. I was his Phillippa, he my little Laura. I did not tell him I had known a

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Trampled Grapes

We have taken, each night, to talking beside the fire. Since her pretended revelation of boy-love, I have felt unable to enquire more deeply into her intentions, her reasons for undertaking this trip. It is odd, she, a woman pretending to be a man, seeks to fend me off by claiming pederastic intentions. I, a man, pretending to be unaware of her sex, must feign a lack of interest in her in order to escape the reproach of same-sex love.

What, then, do we discuss? Dreams, mostly.

“I dreamt of a field full of grapes, being trampled underfoot. ‘He loves it, yes, he loves to turn them to wine,’ I was told, I cannot remember by whom, for this was the last of many changes in the dream.”

Not my dream, no, not this time – hers. “Have you ever tasted wine?”

“Your question is indiscreet. If I say, ‘yes,’ I reveal that I have broken this one of God’s commandments; if I say ‘no,’ I throw doubt on the truth of my dream.”

“Unless we are honest with each other, there is little point in this discussion of dreams.”

“You are a ferenghi, a Frank. Perhaps for you the dream is serious, but for me, I speak to pass the time, to while away the dark night until we can sleep.”

I don’t believe her. She hangs upon these discussions, and notes anxiously the interpretations I venture of her sparing dream-symbols. Of course, no real progress is possible when she will not reveal to me anything of her past (or indeed, the very truth of her nature), but a strange kind of communication is going on even so. She is telling me, I am hurt, and desperate – hence, I suppose, the valley of the trampled grapes. I am saying to her, I too, am drowning. Perhaps we can help each other. Perhaps.

“The images of your dream come from the scriptures, but they speak of war. Is there war in your heart?”

“Perhaps there is.”

“And yet there should be no war among strangers, wanderers in the same desert,” came a new, utterly unexpected intrusion into the conversation.

In our new-found interest in talk, we had neglected the duty of keeping a lookout in these wild regions. Smiling down upon us now we saw the face of a

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Angus blows his whistle for silence, and the grumbling growl of voices dies down. Mr Britt stands, unsteadily (he is clearly still a little shocked) and begins to make a speech:

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he begins. Then repeats himself: “Ladies and Gentlemen. As you can see, our boat is overcrowded and undermanned. There are precisely fifty-four of us in a space intended for thirty at the most. What is more, Mr. Ironside and Miss Taggart’s injuries preclude them from sitting upright with the rest of us, so we will have to leave them where they are for the time being. I am Mr. Sidney Britt, the ship’s master, and I am in command of this boat. I would remind you that there are no passengers on board a life-boat, and that everyone will be expected to pull their weight.”

“First of all, I should like to know if there is anyone among you who has any medical experience, however slight.”

“How about the Doctor, there?” shouts out one of the men in the crowd, indicating Doctor Taskar.

Taskar sits sullen and quiet, taking no notice of the discussion.

Britt pauses, but seeing no response, is about to move on when Diana speaks up perkily:

“My name is Mrs. Jarman, Diana Jarman, sir. I’m a trained nurse, and I’ll be happy to do anything I can.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Jarman. I would remind the rest of you that I shall expect you to assist with managing the boat. That may involve such duties as rowing during calm periods as well as keeping a look-out at night.”

“I will not disguise from you that we are starting with certain disadvantages. We only have half of the drinking water we should have, so we’ll start right away on short rations. Mr Macdonald will issue each of you with two tablespoonfuls of water each day, one in the morning and one in the evening.”

There is a little gasping and murmuring at this, and Angus scowls at the turn the speech is taking.

“As we have quite a few leaks, I shall also have to ask you to help us with bailing out the boat.”

Belatedly aware of the effect his words are having, he concludes:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, if we all pull together and do our best, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get through this together. The Captain and I have determined on making for Saint Helena, five hundred miles due north of here, and as you can see, we are already making good progress.”

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Defaute of slep and hevynesse
Hath sleyn my spirit of quyknesse
That I have lost al lustyhede.
Suche fantasies ben in myn hede
So I not what is best to doo.

“That’s what you’ve been wanting to do, isn’t it, just fuck me, ever since you saw me in the club. That’s all I am to you, isn’t it, a body?”

“No, actually, to tell you the truth. I mean, you have a beautiful body, there’s no denying that, but I actually find voices more alluring really.”

“Voices?”

“Yes, you have a nice speaking voice – very soft and gentle.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better, that you’ve been fantasising about my voice talking dirty to you?”

“Look, I like you. I like to talk to you, to touch you, to (yes) sleep with you. Is there anything wrong with that? If you think I’m just using you for my pleasure, then I’m sorry. I thought that you came too, but maybe you faked it, I don’t know.”

“I didn’t come.”

“Not even when I was eating you out?”

“Oh, that. Yeah, I came then. That’s true. Thanks, by the way. I forgot about that. That was nice.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“That’s up to you.”

“I’d much rather stay and talk to you.”

“Fine. Stay then.”

“I mean, why should I care what you do for a living? I’m sorry if it’s a problem for you, though.”

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Laura at home, a cruel girl who would not give me satisfaction, though I offered her everything I had – everything my family had gathered over the generations. She took the gifts, but laughed in my face when I tried to claim something back from her. She let me kiss her hand; then slapped me across the face with it … and laughed. She was always laughing, that one.

“I tried to write her verses, for I had heard that women admire a clever man, but my efforts had no merit even in my own eyes. So I asked the schoolmaster for help, and he told me a poem I could use. I remember it still, I think. Ah yes:

Questa fenice, ch’al bel sol s’accende

What could that be? Something like:

Questing phoenix, who braves solar ascent

And then:

E a dramma a dramma consumando vassi
from drama to drama consuming vastly

No, not that. That’s not what it means. I’m joking. It sounds a bit like that, though. One could go on:

Mentre, di splendor cinta, ardendo stassi,
Men trade your splendour for ardent ecstasy
Contrario fio al suo pianeta rende;
Contrary faith back to your planet render

Perchè quel che da lei al ciel ascende,
Tepido fumo ed atra nebbia fassi,
Onde i raggi a’ nostri occhi occolti lassi
E quello avvele, per cui arde e splende.

“What can I say for that? Perché sounds a little like “perky,” I suppose – only it means “because.” Some stuff about how the smoke of its burning

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bearded man. Other shapes, black on black, in the darkness behind him revealed an unspecified number of companions.

I made to leap up, but my companion motioned me to remain seated. A sudden tension in her revealed, nevertheless, that my first instinct was correct. This was no chance-encountered set of caravan drivers. The weapons at their belts, as they gradually stole into the light, and resolute expressions on their faces, showed little patience with the niceties of desert etiquette.

Like a gracious hostess at home, or here, like the master of a great tribe, she motioned to them to sit down nevertheless. Three of them did so, while the others hung back – “to watch the horses,” said the bearded man, clearly their leader. One could not but suspect that their task was rather to make an inventory of the horses, and other goods also.

My rifle was still carefully stowed in my saddlebag, whence I removed it each evening before I went to bed, to lay under my pillow. So many futile precautions against the eventuality which had now befallen us. We were caught as neatly as two partridges in a trap, and were hardly likely to extricate ourselves without (at least) the loss of all our property.

I feared, too, for my companion’s secret when it came time to search us for hidden valuables. Best to keep them talking, I knew – she knew. We communicated as much in a single glance.

“So, brothers, what brings you to these barren regions, so dangerous for travellers from the city?” said the bearded man, apparently keen to keep up the appearance of civility for a time at least.

“I am here to look for old books and papers in the ruins to the north.” I said, hoping to steer him off the subject of loot right away.

“For treasure, you mean?”

Fat chance. “A kind of treasure. For old things which are valuable in my country, but only if they are perfectly preserved and treated with care.”

“And have you found any yet?” he asked insinuatingly.

“None. The places where I will be looking lie far to the north, in Turkestan.”

“And your guide?”

“Is a native of the mountains, and therefore well qualified to guide me there.”

“Is this true?” he turned his attention to my blue-robed princess of the sands, her slight body tensed like that of a panther, eager to spring, and yet unable to take action. All three of the men sitting across from us had their

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[Extracts from Julie’s Diary]

[Monday] … She was never that butch, really. I used to have to be quite naughty to get her going, but now she’s just Daddy’s little slut. I mean, Bruno’s okay – I like him, even if he is a psycho and a queer, but she’s just fallen for him in a big way. I’m not jealous. Just scared for her, a bit. I know she’s never fallen for a man before. You should of seen her this morning:

Ann: Was it good for you last night?

Bruno: Yes, Ann. [That’s all he ever says, pretty much, even when he’s been licking you out or fucking you in the arse. Some pimp he’d make!]

A: You are going to stay with us now, aren’t you?

B: I want to, Ann, but I cannot know.

A: But … you said you loved me. [Actually he said he loved both of us, but he said it a lot more before he got into our pants, if you ask me. Still, most stiff cocks are like that – they’ll say anything to get laid].

B: I love you, but I have a mission [yeah, sure!], and I cannot sleep.

That last bit is true, I think. He certainly doesn’t seem to sleep at all. After he finished fucking Ann last night, she just went off to sleep (God, no wonder, the way she was carrying on – anybody would of thought she was a virgin, and she ain’t no virgin). He got up and went out into the kitchen a bit later, ’cos I saw the light going on out there. And then, when I had to get up to pee, he was sitting at the table out there with his head in his hands, just scanning or whatever the fuck he calls it.

[Tuesday] … I dunno why I keep writing in this thing. Bored, I spose. Ann must know about it, ’cos she’s seen me doing it. Christ, I wonder if she reads it? All the stuff I’ve written about her. Anyway, Ann, if you are reading this, then I love you, you little slut, and I love the way you eat pussy too, so don’t get shitty with me about any of the other stuff. Anyway, you’re so all over Bruno these days that I might as well not exist.

She questions him all the time about his mission, in bed and out of it, and he just goes droning on about it the same way whether he’s drinking coffee or having his cock sucked. God, that bastard must think he’s in paradise. I gotta admit that I’m quite into him myself. He gave me a good going-over this morning while she was out collecting the supplies at the depot, and I haven’t felt so relaxed for ages. I really think he likes the fact that I’m not always questioning him like she is. But then, she’s a bitch in love and I’m just a bitch.

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NIGHTS

WITH

Giordano Bruno

________________________________________________

Il fine di tutto l’operazione è forse essenzialmente questo, modificarsi.
– Gabriela La Porta, I Tarocchi di Giordano Bruno (1984)

________________________________________________

A U C K L A N D:
Printed for the Hermetic Years
MDC/MM

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•

And wel ye woot, agaynes kynde
Hyt were to lyven in thys wyse,
For nature wolde nat suffyse
To noon erthly creature
Nat longe tyme to endure
Withoute slep and be in sorwe …

It doesn’t really work, does it? But that’s the essence of fantasy. Philippa (that’s what you’ve decided her name is) is not going to fall in with you, with your way of death. The thing is hopeless before it begins. Time to return from the soft smoky darkness of this haunted club to the harsh glare of the streets – time to refresh your memories of sleep.

Puis, sans jamais me parler d’Henriette, il me fait un sermon sur la vie à venir. Then, without even mentioning Henriette, the Fleming read a sermon on the life to come, the vanities we vainly prefer, and the necessity of respecting these days, which do not belong to us …

“D’you have a light?”

Looking up, you see the dark-haired girl, karl-kona, she of the wing-tattooed hips.

X O

R G

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He only did it because I asked him to, though. It was only that first time that he actually took the initiative. He really learns fast – unless all that stuff about being an alien was just put on, at first. He’s certainly learnt that you don’t offer to eat a lady just out of politeness. That one little mistake has meant that he has to satisfy both of us, in our bed, every night, before he can go brood like he wants to.

[Wednesday] … This scene is getting weirder all the time. I gotta admit, I was expecting him to piss off at some stage without warning, leaving his little wifie Ann all forlorn. Seriously, it’s a bit like that. She cooks and cleans all the time (like she’s sposed to, of course, given she’s in charge of all the rooms – but she used to make me do it, too). Now when he goes out in the morning she starts going on at me about how it felt last night, and what can she do to try and make him sleep better tonight. I tell her that he’s not going to sleep no matter how much she pleases his dick, and that he’s really only doing it for her anyway (I mean, he is kind of a nice guy – he’s so polite to both of us, and he does anything we ask him to. Not just sexually, but otherwise. I know I’m a cynic, but he’s so sweet to Ann – talking to her, and kissing her, and calming her down. Only, it is kind of like the first time for her, and she’s old enough to see that it won’t last – which is why she keeps on asking me if shaving her pussy would help [it did look kind of cool, and I think he liked it too], or asking him to spank her on the bare behind [that didn’t work. He just kept kissing her and wouldn’t get into the game. It was the same when she was punishing me that time. He didn’t seem to get that I was into it. Just started crying when I was screaming at her to stop. What a pussy!]).

Anyway, I was going to say. He brought a friend home this evening. Aye, Aye, I was thinking, he’s been telling some bozos in a bar about how he’s got two bitches in tow, and how they’ll do anything for him, and they only charge fifty credits for a blow-job. It doesn’t usually take long. He was a ratty looking old guy, with a long white beard and a wrinkled face, and he looked like he hadn’t had a meal or a shower for quite some time.

Luckily Ann and me were dressed (sometimes she wants to open the door to him in the nude – and once she just shouted for him to come in, so he could see us in the middle of a 69). She looked at him kind of funny and said “Who’s this?” Like she was afraid or something.

“He is a friend, I think. I was talking to him down at the docks.”

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Angus turns and looks out to sea, wide and choppy with the swell. There is now no sign of the other boat. His reverie is broken when he sees a large, brown, brawny hand thrust in front of his face:

“Robert Watts, from Reading, but my friends call me Tiny. Look, I don’t know much about seamanship. I’m an aeronautical engineer by trade. But if you want anything done at any time, just explain the job to me and I’ll do it.”

Angus takes his hand and pumps it.

“Thanks, Mr. … Watts, is it?”

“Tiny.”

“Tiny, then. I’m Angus. Thanks very much. I think we’ll be needing all the help we can get.”

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hands laid casually near to their weapons: an elaborate revolver in the case of the leader, long curving knives for the other two.

“Yes,” she replied, laconically.

“And you too hope to get rich from this quest?”

“No. I shall be paid for the job I do.”

“And is that all?”

“That is all.”

“It is written, then. Your quest interests me [turning his attention back to me]. You have little equipment for a Frank – two horses, a rifle, a few blankets, food. How do you hope to survive till you find your destination?”

“I do not need much.”

“No. We, however, need a good deal. We need food for our horses, ammunition for our guns, and gold for our wives. And how are we to get those things in the desert?”

“Not by robbing others.”

He scowled. “My father was a hajji, and told me that it was my duty to resist the infidel at all times, in all places. I do not rob, or steal, except in fair fight. And yet, my men must eat. I have a good mind to help you find your treasure to the north.”

“It is very far. It will take much time.”

“Not so far, I think, as you say. Nor do I fear that it will take so long as you say. You will have an incentive, you see. But we can be your guides from now on …”

He signalled to his two men, who moved over to stand in front of my companion. Their knives were out, and their faces were grinning.

“No,” I cried. “You don’t understand …” and, because I could think of no other way to safeguard her from immediate death, “This is my woman.”

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G.D. [God?]

Voglio scrivere un libro ove tutte le parole sieno vive e musicali come le foglie che fremono variamente ad ogni mutazione di sofio in una giornata del mio marzo
– Gabriele d’Annunzio, Il caso Wagner.

Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863-1938). Italian poet and Nietzschean man-of-destiny. Born Abruzzi; died on the Riviera. Led a force to occupy the Dalmatian port of Fiume, 1919-20 (precursor to Mussolini’s march on Rome).

Canto nuovo (1882)
Il trionfo della morte (1894)

The ant-like detail, obsessive cross-hatched minutiae of Gustave Doré – his London cityscapes, weighty phantasmagoria of hell, sky, clouds in his Bible, Dante.

John (Giovanni?) Dee (1527-1608). Renaissance Magus, mathematician, architect, astrologer. Author (among numerous other works) of a Treatise on the Rosie Crucian Secrets. Absent from England during the two years (1583-85) of Giordano Bruno’s residence there.

GET

WET

62

2008-01-27T08:52:00.000+13:00

ACT III: Sabotage

The only two natives who helped us at any time were the old serang, a proper gentleman, and a fireman from Zanzibar, and they couldn’t do enough to help.
– Angus Macdonald

• Scene [Sharks (Saturday 7/11, c. 9.30 a.m.)]

[DAY 1] appears on the blank screen, then fades into:

Angus lying against the gunwale of the boat, looking exhausted, when he notices a knocking on the planks beside him. It sounds like a knuckle rapping at a front door, and we see him mentally running over the possible causes of such a sound. He looks up. No, everyone else is sitting still, or sprawled out in sleep. He looks down at his hands. No, it does not appear to be coming from inside the boat. He looks over the side.

A huge dark shape with a fin is scraping and bashing against the boat. He stares at it in horror, until someone else’s voice cries “Shark!”

Tiny gets hold of the boat-hook and jabs it at the creature, which swims away unhurriedly.

As the camera draws back, we see a number of others, huge dark-grey monsters, diving and circling around the open boat, biding their time.

• Scene [The Doctor (Sunday 8/11, c. 11.30 p.m.)]

[DAY 2]:

It is night, waves are breaking over the side, and everyone is getting soaked.
Every now and then the Doctor, who has been largely silent up till now, shouts, “Boy, bring me my coffee,” or, “Boy, another beer.” …

Insert: [Angus standing in the snow, in a German concentration camp, looking down at the Doctor’s pocket-knife – A guard shouts out: Raus! Raus!]

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Byron

I was looking at the books along an old bookstall: Charing Cross, perhaps, or one of the barrows beside the Seine, when I found the middle part of a life of Byron. This was the part which came in between a book about his life in Italy, and his early life. It was called something like The Years of Fame.

The cover had a picture of an anguished face upon it: tortured, wreathed with snakes. A Laocoön painted by Fuseli, perhaps. Not, in any case, the Grecian beauty of the hero – a darker, fatter, more fleshy reality.

The book pleased me nevertheless. It seemed to fill a gap: an objectification of pain, perhaps – some sense of it as part of the composition of a personality or a life. I don’t know why I record these fragmentary indications even, they are far from what is in my heart at present.

[They fucked her all last night. It was inevitable, I suppose, as soon as I told them who, what she was. The bearded one was quite sure that I would want to watch, and – so you know – I’m not sure he was wrong.

I remember thinking that her thighs were smooth, smoother than I would have expected, but then the screaming and the coupling began to jerk her here and there, and I was lost in a nightmare of … what? The nightmare of shared species, I suppose. I am, in a sense, one of them, and that’s the trouble. Calling them animals would be only too easy. I am one of them.]

This desert life is clearly bad for the imagination. My dreams have got shorter, more perfunctory, while everyday life seems to be falling into a morass of phantasms. When I woke up this morning I expected to find a group of brigands guarding us on every side, with my sweet guide turned to their serving whore.

There was nothing. The fire had gone out in the night, but the animals were still tethered on the other side. My companion slumbered on in her desert coloured bedroll. The whole thing – jerking cocks, cruel blows and curses, glint in a bearded eye, must have been fantasy. A more concrete fantasy than any I have hitherto experienced, though.

64

2008-01-26T10:48:00.000+13:00

Going East

That things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
– George Eliot, Middlemarch.

Boredom I can take. I mean, I should be used to it by now. And horror – well, at least it isn’t boring. Boredom and horror combined, though, that’s a bit much.”
…
“No, not the film, that literary festival – the one I was telling you about before.”
…
“Where do I begin? No, the film, that was quite fun, I thought.”
…
“Which one? The space one or the desert one?”
…
“Hard to say, really. It’s rather an eccentric place: one man’s idea of a film festival running all year round – only all the films are crap.”
…
“You know, I’m really pleased you enjoyed it. About ten minutes in I was beginning to think that I was insane ever to have taken anyone to that place.”
…
“Actually I think it’s a friend’s house, but he stores all the old cans of Eastman Kodak in there. It must be a bit of a fire-risk, really.”
…
“No, that was just me trying to understand the dialogue.”
…
“‘Oooff’?”
…
“There were certainly plenty of things getting stuck into people.”
…
“So what was your professional opinion of the standard of the performances?”
…

65

2008-01-26T10:46:00.000+13:00

The fire needed rekindling to make our morning coffee, and it must have been half an hour before we exchanged any words. I was on the point of telling her my dream when I saw a little gold glint out of the corner of my eye.

Walking over and scuffing the earth aside with my foot, I found a curved dagger with a jewelled hilt half-hidden there. It was a crude piece of work, of no particular antiquity or value, but it was of especial interest to me. I had seen it the night before gleaming at the belt of the bearded leader of the band.

I picked it up and brought it back to camp. My first instinct was to say nothing. What was there to say? If it had not been a dream, then – how did we escape? Had we escaped? I wanted to say nothing, to keep riding on to those cyclopean ruins which have so long dominated my imagination. This, surely, was a mere distraction. But no, something had to be said:

“What’s this?”

“A dagger.”

“Have you seen it before?”

“Yes.”

“Last night?”

“Yes.”

“How did we escape?”

She looked at me with her great brown lustrous eyes, and then, with a single swift movement, reached up to free the flap of her headdress. It fell to reveal her face.
Even in the abominable scenes I had witnessed the night before, two or three bodies at a time straining over the bared femininity of my companion, her face had never been revealed. Indeed, the bandit chief had ordered his man to cover her eyes, as if fearing some evil influence from them.

What I saw now was the face of an angel – perfect, chiselled features, and, as she proceeded to unwrap the rest of her head adornment, long sweeps of hair descending like a net about her.

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“Y-yes, I love you.”

“Yet you watched me defiled by a dozen men last night.”

“I’m sorry. There was nothing I could do. I thought they would kill you right away. I’m sorry.”

“Do I disappoint you now you can look upon me?”

“Of course not. No, but … I mean, are you real, is this real?”

“This is real.”

66

2008-01-26T10:45:00.000+13:00

“God, I didn’t mean that. Sorry.”
…
“No! For fuck’s sake, I didn’t even know what films he would be showing. I mean, it’s generally old Communist propaganda newsreels with some drossy B-grade Sci-fi flick as the main feature, but I had no idea it would have a bunch of Italian-speaking Bedouin chicks wrestling each other in a sandpit.”
…
“Come on. You believe me, don’t you?”
…
“Would you like another drink, something like that?”
…
“But you do accept my apology?”
…
“Okay, whatever you want to talk about.”
…
“Oh, the literary festival. That really was a downer. I was supposed to be covering the event for a magazine, but they all made a point of ignoring me and walking away every time I went up and tried to talk to anyone.”
…
“Yeah, but I’ll get my revenge. Wait till they see the write-up I give them!”
…
“Well, I thought of opening with something like: ‘I was determined to write a balanced, statesmanlike piece about the Going East Literary Festival; but then, halfway through, I suddenly thought “Fuck it: why not tell it like it is?”’”
…
“Say what?”
…
“I don’t see why not. I’ve done it before. Not, admittedly, in this particular publication, but it does rather add to the flavour, don’t you think?”
…
“I’m sorry.”
…
“No, it’s just that I’m letting the rancorous side of my personality dominate – nagging on about the poor organisers of this festival, who I’m sure didn’t cock it all up on purpose.”
…

67

2008-01-26T10:44:00.000+13:00

She took my hand and placed it on her breast, through the loose desert robes, I felt the scent of her hair in my face, and seized her mouth like a well of unimaginable sweetness. Her flesh was like bread to a starving man, musky incense from cold ashes.

A long time later we lay in each other’s arms in a place outside time. Her body was unimaginably perfect – soft and rounded, hard and honed. My lust was slaked, my inventiveness exhausted. I wanted to hold her only, rejoice in this lunar beauty.

“But …”

“But what?”

“But how did you …”

“I am a Jinniyah.”

“You are a what?”

“I am not of the race of Adam. My people were born of air and fire, not earth and spit.”

Clearly she was mad. She was mad and beautiful. She was mad but I was in love with her, had been from (it seemed) the first moment I had seen her unveiled eyes. She was mad, after all, to take up with me. She was mad, yet she had somehow extricated us from the clutches of a band of robbers, the kind who slit their victims’ throats and bury them every day in the desert.

If she was mad, so was I.

“But … where?”

“Sssh,” she stilled me with a hand across my mouth. “Is this not sweet? Is this not better than thought?”

Her fingers on my manhood brought me again to potency. Her sweet lips descending compelled me to unimaginable heavens of dark bliss.

68

2008-01-26T10:41:00.000+13:00

• Scene [First Death (Monday 9/11, c. 7.30 p.m.)]

[DAY 3]:

The Doctor is rambling and cursing, leaning up against Angus’s side. The latter is trying to comfort him, patting him and murmuring endearments.

Slumps against him. Horrible bright staring eyes.

• Scene [Sea-Burial (Tuesday 10/11, c. 5.30 a.m.)]

[DAY 4]:

Mr. Britt: “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, we now commit his body to the deep …”

Insert: [Angus: “We can’t waste any cloth! We haven’t any to spare.”

Tiny: “But how will the others feel? You know what’s going to happen the moment he’s overboard!”

Angus: “Well, we can weigh him down with something, if you like, so he’ll sink more quickly, but there’s no way we can cover him up completely.”

Tiny: “It’s just those eyes of his …”]

The body has scarcely slid beneath the surface when we see the flurries in the water, and a red stain, with thrashing fins, The sharks have had their first reward.

• Scene [Bob (Wednesday 11/11, c. 11.30 a.m.)]

[DAY 5]:

Angus is picking his way, on all fours, through the intricately entwined bodies which constitute the deck of the boat. Eventually he reaches Bob, strained-faced, black-bearded Bob. “Do you think we have a chance, Angus?”

“Everything’ll be all right, Bob. We’re bound to be picked up. How’s your back today?”

“Not so good, Angus, not so good.”

“Can’t you sit up at all?”

Bob makes an effort to raise himself, but immediately breaks off with a wheezing intake of breath: “Christ, that hurts!”

69

2008-01-26T10:39:00.000+13:00

“Yeah, but I’ve got to tell you, there was one thing I really liked in that weekend. They’d invited a group of woman novelists to be on a kind of discussion panel about romance fiction (along with one gay male to keep up the gender balance), and at the end there was time for a few questions.

Someone asked one of the woman writers how she managed to keep on writing and whether she ever got discouraged. She replied, ‘Well, I get up and sit down at my desk, and then I start crying.’ Not racking sobs, she explained, but just sort of drizzling, hopeless tears. ‘Why?” said one of the other writers. “Oh, from fear.” You know, fear that she wouldn’t be able to think of anything else, or to continue.

That really appealed to me.”
…
“I suppose it is weird, really. It just seemed very natural to me, very truthful. Weeping from fear: that’s so much closer to my experience of life than all the other business-like bullshit they were going on about. I mean, she had some good tips on how to get round your blocks and so on, but it was mainly that image that got me. There’s something so real about tears.”

And about the image of a slim, dark girl with wings around her hips: Pallas Athena, or Camilla, the virgin queen of the Volscians, who ran so swiftly that she could pass through a cornfield without bending a blade, and cross the water without wetting a toe.

GIVE

UP?

70

2008-01-26T10:37:00.000+13:00

The Necklace

We have reached the ruins, at last. The journey has gone fast, but I no longer know precisely where we are or what regions we have been traversing. The landscapes look the same – brown dusty hills, stunted acacia trees and thorny bushes in the crevices of the rock, a barren, nightmare land. My companion guides me deftly, and each night we make love before falling asleep.

My compass and maps are gone, however. I haven’t seen them since that night with the bandits when she threw off the veil. It seems to me that we have come further than we should have in so short a time. I am drugged by her, every sense of my body cries out for her like sweet water on parched earth – as if it could never be slaked.

At night, I dream of libraries and art galleries of strange images, conversations with curators and connoisseurs, but their world seems already stranger than the one I am crossing. Can I really take her back with me? I fear there may be no turning back from the regions I am approaching now.

The first sight of them was undramatic. We were crossing another stony valley of dried-up braids, relics of a long-gone river system, when I looked up to see a suspiciously regular mound.

It was not far from us, perhaps a mile or two, and not much out of our way. We walked to it, and, as I toiled up the hill, the first tiny shards of pottery, leached down by millennia of rain, began to appear in the friable soil.

It was a tell, of course, and quite an impressive one, but then they are hardly unusual in this cross-roads of debatable land.

My companion, as so often during the day, said nothing, but (seeing my interest) tethered the horses and began to prepare camp. I was already scurrying around, looking at fragments of brick and old, exposed walls – trying to fit the indications I could see into my archaeological map of the area. Just one datable artefact can be enough to give one an approximate timeframe for such a site, but it can take much time and work to find it. In any case, it was the promised ancient libraries of the silk route which were my goal. Why was I halting at the first untouched site we stumbled across?

At length, as the shadows of evening began to steal across the rough dirt I had been piling up in my enthusiasm, my companion made her way towards me across the hill. She looked at the crude beginnings of my dig, smiled

71

2008-01-26T10:35:00.000+13:00

Angus’ face speaks volumes as he pats his friend on the shoulder, telling him to get some rest.

• Scene [Dead Lascars (Thursday 12/11, c. 5.30 a.m.)]

[DAY 6]:

Lascars are swaying back and forwards, chanting “Pani, sahib, pani, sahib.” The camera tracks away from them to show Tiny and Angus pitching the last of three dead lascars into the sea.

• Scene [Close Embrace (Friday 13/11, c. 9.30 p.m.)]

[DAY 7]:

Miss Taggart is sitting and swaying on the gunwale. She pitches forward as the boat rolls, and we see a fearful mass of sores on her back as she topples into the hold. She falls on top of another passenger, Mr Ball, who is heard protesting feebly. As she is pulled off him by Angus and Tiny, we see that he too is dead.

• Scene [More burials (Saturday 14/11, c. 5.30 a.m.)]

[DAY 8]:
…

• Scene [Engineer (Sunday night 15/11, c. 5.30 a.m.)]

[DAY 9]:
…

72

2008-01-26T10:34:00.000+13:00

The old man came in and took off his hat, would you believe it. Bruno asked if his friend could have a wash, and Ann went into her mother-hen routine. I think she was kind of relieved actually (so was I – I don’t really fancy fucking any friends he picks up down by the docks). She was thinking that this must be his contact, or whoever it is he’s waiting for (she still believes all that b.s. he keeps spouting). Anyway, Ann got the old guy some new clothes, and threw his old ones out, and he was so grateful you wouldn’t believe. Sat there with a big grin in his face, in a bathrobe, drinking coffee, while Bruno and Ann fussed around him. I guess she was wondering if he’s picked up some kind of cult infection or something. Free goods for space derelicts.

Finally, to be polite, I asked the old man what he did, and he said that he was a teacher, and that he’d been moving out to the belt to set up a new school when his bank got hit. And that was how he’d got stuck on Space Wheel Three. He had a funny way of talking – very polite and measured, but he really started opening up after a bit. I could tell he liked the way I looked, but he wasn’t crude about it. I was kind of going on about how I would have put on some more clothes if I’d known we were gonna have guests, and he said that I could not look more exquisite, and that I was a feenix of beauty. So I asked him what that was, and he went off into some poem about it, and told me it was a bird which burnt itself to ashes and then came back to life.

Bruno got interested then, and asked him to repeat the poem, and tell him all about it. It was in some foreign language, and he had to explain what every part meant before that geek would calm down. To tell you the truth, I was a bit jealous, because before that the old man only had eyes for me, and normally people pay lots of attention to Ann not me ’cos she looks so hot, so I told him I’d write it down in my diary. Both of them got interested then, and they asked me about the diary, and how often I wrote in it, and what I wrote, and all that sort of thing. Ann was listening pretty hard, too, even though she must have known about it for ages. I mean, it takes me hours, and I got no idea why I do it, really. I said I couldn’t show it to them, because it was too private, but that I could read them some bits if they really wanted. God, I wanted to cry, they were so polite and sweet about it. The old man looked as if he wanted to marry me, and kept on going on about how unfair it was that “such talent should coexist with such beauty” – and he wasn’t shitting me, either, ’cos he listened to every word.

I mean, that’s how we spent the whole evening. Me reading out stuff, and them commenting on it (especially the old man), ’cos Ann was sitting on

73

2008-01-25T09:45:00.000+13:00

His Girl Friday

Comme elle était trés lourde, ils la portaient alternativement
– Gustave Flaubert, “Hérodias”

You want it always to be night, and always to be winter. Why? It’s comforting to look out on the dark, see the streetlights burning on bare walls and pavements, feel liberated from the pressure of crowds. Then again, it’s good to wrap up warmly against the cold, feel insulated, wrapped in endless layers of padding. You never want to feel the sun again.

The insomniac is the total loner. As the hours go by, companions, activities, distractions, occupations all drop off, leaving him face to face – or her, for that matter – with whatever’s waiting out there in the darkness.

Tonight you woke up with a start to see a strange face floating beside your bed – but the room was strange as well. She, too, appeared to have mistaken her way. She was pale, with a frieze of straw-blonde hair. You closed your eyes. When you opened them again, she’d vanished.

Which leads you (of course) to question whether she was ever there at all. Probably not. In any case, whatever she was, strayed reveller, hallucination, fever dream, ghost, manuka goddess, muse, she has – it seems – removed your only chance of sleep.

Time to get up again and shuffle the cards for inspiration …

GREATER

TRUMPS

74

2008-01-25T09:44:00.000+13:00

haughtily (she had removed the flap of her burnoose), then walked a few feet away and scuffed at the dust with her leather boots.

I saw a glint of gold, then, hurrying over to look more closely, a deep blue glow. Bending over, I carefully extricated the remains of a necklace from the compacted dirt. The thread had long since rotted away, but the individual beads of lapis lazuli were each lying where they had fallen, perhaps two thousand years before. The strangeness of it overwhelmed me suddenly. I was alone on a hillside in an unknown land, looking at an artefact which had been hidden from human eyes for longer than my own culture had existed.

Alone? Yes, for now I was alone. My companion had vanished. Hurrying down the hill, I saw that she was not beside the horses, nor was she off collecting firewood for our little campfire, already flaming up nicely in the dry desert air. She was nowhere. Her horse, bedroll, possessions were still there, at the campsite, but she was gone.

I missed her warmth, her smile, her scent that night, and the many nights that followed.

75

2008-01-25T09:41:00.001+13:00

• Scene [Annie (Monday 16/11, c. 5.30 a.m.)]

[DAY 10]:
…

• Scene [Mr Britt (Tuesday 17/11, c. 12.30 p.m.)]

[DAY 11]:
…

• Scene [Bob (Wednesday 18/11, c. 3.30 p.m.)]

[DAY 12]:
…

• Scene [Seven burials (Thursday 19/11, c. 5.30 a.m.)]

[DAY 13]:
…

• Scene [Taking over (Friday 20/11, c. 5.30 p.m.)]

[DAY 14]:
…

• Scene [Rations (Saturday 21/11, c. 8.30 a.m.)]

[DAY 15]:
…

76

2008-01-25T09:41:00.000+13:00

Bruno’s knee and just kind of kissing him, and he was kissing her back, but both of them were listening as well. I tried to leave out all the bitchy stuff at first, but there was just so much of it that I felt ashamed till the old man, Joseph he said his name was, told me it was “excellent satire,” and very “true-to-life,” so after a while I started reading out most of what was there.

Well, anyway, after that there was no question of kicking the old man out. He’d only been here a couple of hours, he said, and I must admit I don’t think he would have survived much longer if Bruno hadn’t of found him. I managed to talk to Ann alone in the kitchen, and ask her if she could get him a room or something, and she kissed me and said she was real proud of me, and I burst into tears, I felt so happy. I love her so much, and she was looking at me like I was special, more even than Bruno. So the old man’s gonna stay, and he said he’d show me some of his own writing, but I don’t think I’ll understand it much. Ann found him a room down in the basement, and I went down with him to settle him in, and show him where things were. And then I kissed him goodnight, but nothing else, ’cos he’s really old.

[Thursday] … When I woke up this morning I couldn’t believe it. I’ve started sleeping in the upper bunk, to leave those two alone, so I just lay there thinking about the evening before, and all the shit I’d written about it in my diary. I mean, what was I thinking to read all that stuff out loud to them? I felt so ashamed, but then Ann crawled in beside me, and said that she’d never loved me more or been so proud of me as when I’d been so polite to the ratty old man, and that Bruno had really appreciated it too.

The funny thing is that I wasn’t even thinking about them when I did it, it just seemed natural because he was so polite and friendly to me, and I kind of liked the way he paid me so much attention, and not just undressing me with his eyes. So I said that and she told me that that was why she loved me, because I was such a good person deep down, and we had a really nice cuddle. I really thought Bruno had stuffed it up between us, not that there was that much to stuff up, but now I think he’s made it better somehow. I asked her how she’d feel if I had an affair with the old man, and she said that he’d certainly die a happy old man if I did.

Later on I went down to see how the old man was, and he was kind of sick in bed, talking with Bruno about a whole bunch of old papers and stuff. I came in and asked if I could do anything, and the old man said that all he wanted from me was the delight of my presence and my conversation. Bruno

77

2008-01-25T09:38:00.000+13:00

obscures the phoenix bird and, at the same time, produces the light that makes it divine.

Tal il mio spirto (ch’il divin splendore
Accende e illustra), mentre va spiegando
Quel che tanto riluce nel pensiero,

We’ve made ourselves a kind of gutless language,
dirtying everything
it touches: Perky tits, arse, tush …

Manda da l’alto suo concetto fore
Rima, ch’il vago sol vad’oscurando,
Mentre mi struggo e liquefaccio intiero.

How can I say
what you mean to me
– Rima, spirit of the forest?

Oimè! questo atro e nero
Nuvol di foco infosca col suo stile
Quel ch’aggrandir vorrebbe, e’l rende umile.

Your soul evades those nets,
black, crusted fog.
You go out singing in the pouring rain.

“When she heard me repeat this to her, she laughed louder than ever, but said that I had pleased her for once, so she would let me see what I would never touch. First, though, I must bow at her feet.

“A quick flash of her black hairy figa, that was what she gave me. One glimpse to last me down the years. I lunged for it, but she was gone. She could always run fast, that one – too fast for me, but not for everyone, as it turned out.

“The next year she ran off with a city boy. She gave him more than a flash of what she had, I know, for she was gone less than a year. When she came back she would see no-one. The rumour spread that she had caught some

78

2008-01-24T09:25:00.001+13:00

Gris-Gris

She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all
– Graham Greene, Brighton Rock.

The worst horror of all. English class.

Natasha is a little monkey, a 12-yr-old Kop [Korean princess]. A proto-vamp, tight-jeaned and platform-heeled, she spends each weekend working in the family fruit shop (you almost wrote “sweat shop”). Her voice seldom descends below a supercharged whine. In a year or two she will arise to scourge the male race. In the meantime she is content to practise on you.

Joo Li is more Garbo-esque: sullen, half-aggressive, uncooperative. She’s Natasha’s shadow, her anti-self, her complement – less semi-self-consciously sensual, more defiantly hostile and bored.

Dong Hoon is a fat bright stolid boy. Relentlessly mocked by the girls, he maintains the Korean male’s ineluctable self-confident charm / arrogance.

Collectively, they’re the Crack Babies. You tutor them every Tuesday and Thursday night for two and a half hours, of which only the first hour and a half can be filled with vague attempts at conversation and grammar. The last hour is always games.

Tonight they have struggled through the present perfect (“Have you ever … eaten a crocodile?” “No, I have never eaten a crocodile” “Have you ever … swum in the sea?” “Yes, I have often swum in the sea”), and a few rounds of Taboo, and are looking bored, with half an hour to go before you can decently dismiss them.

“This is really boring,” shrieks Natasha.

“Do you want to play another game?”

“Not if it’s stupid.”

“It’s a dream-game.”

Against their will, you can see a little interest appearing. They might be willing to give it a go, at least.

“What’s it about?”

“You’ll have to close your eyes, and listen to me. Picture what I describe to you. You’re in a forest, walking through the trees. Look around, and get a

79

2008-01-24T09:23:00.000+13:00

disease in the city, something terrible which only the worst whores could contract.

“I went to visit her every day of the week, but she would never see me. I could hear her laugh, weaker each time, from within her room as her mother told her I was waiting outside – but she wouldn’t see me. Not till she was dead. Then I saw her, saw the worthless whore I’d dreamed about through all my youth and young manhood, the girl who’d teased me and mocked me and never taken pity on me for a single moment. She lay there with a smile on her lips like the Madonna, though her soul must have gone straight to hell …”

“And Laurence?” I asked, confused and interested against my will. It all seemed to jibe only too well with my own dreams of the heart of the snow, the scar, the girl.

“What? Ah, Lorenzo, he was like a little girl to me. I used him like one. His Mummy had made him scared of women, and he liked to have a man to take care of him. I found that out on the ship, coming down. I caught him one day with his trousers open, pleasing himself, and threatened to tell the whole crew if he would not do what I said. In truth, he hardly needed the threats, for he must have been thinking about it for some time. I made him kiss it first, before I did all the things I’d dreamed of with that false whore …”

“You fucking liar! He was a British boy, not a …”

“Ah, you loved him, too, Captain? Perhaps you too have thought of him in your warm bag, pressed up against you at night?”

I wanted to strike the foreign brute, with his dirty talk of sacred things. I wanted to knife him then and there, like a great gross elephant seal. But somehow I could not. I looked at his full, slug-like lips, strangely in contrast with his wizened mountaineer’s body, and felt the wisdom it contained, wisdom denied me, secret knowledge of the senses and the mind. I had fucked my girl, while he had never touched his own, but I knew that I was a child beside him.

He smiled, greasily, with putrid self-assurance, then the smile faded into a frown. “You wish to know what I know, do you not, Captain Jordan? But it is not Laurence you wish to know, now, is it? It is yourself. You should have spoken earlier …”

I should have spoken earlier. I could have held that white boy’s body against mine. I could have cut out this Swiss bastard’s heart and eaten it raw on the end of my knife. And now all that was left was he and I – and the racking blizzard outside.

80

2008-01-24T09:22:00.000+13:00

that “treatment” he’s always on about, and that was why it didn’t mean the same thing for him as for Ann and me. I said I was sorry, too, and he said he’d go down and talk to the old man for me if I wanted him to. I said I did, ’cos I just feel so embarrassed about the whole thing. I really thought I was doing a nice thing, but it turned out so bad.

He came back about an hour later and told me that the old man had said to say that he was really sorry, and that he’d leave just as soon as he could get up again (he was still a bit sick, he said) and that he hoped that I wouldn’t stop visiting him. I got Bruno to come with me at first, ’cos I wanted to check the old man was okay but I was kind of embarrassed to see him alone, but he was so sweet that I asked him to go away after a bit.

This is some of what the old man said to me:

“‘All life’s grandeur / is something with a girl in summer’ [that bit was from a poem, he said, but not one of his]. I loved a girl once, and even married her, but she changed over the years, and became cold, while I grew ever more in love with her, until finally she told me to go away.”

I asked him if that was when he decided to leave Earth, but he said that it had been long before. I also asked her if she was beautiful, and he said yes, but not as pretty as me.

“So you see, last night, when you so sweetly offered yourself to me, I remembered all those old sorrows, and felt quite overcome by them. I also knew that you were doing it out of pure politeness, and no real feeling for me, so I felt upset. I’m very sorry to have upset you in my turn, though. You see, I haven’t met any people I liked so much for years as you and your charming friend, and – of course – Lieutenant Bruno. But I’m an old man now and could never hope to be a lover again.”

“Would you like me to be your lover? Really?”

“Of course, my dear. But you see, I can’t … do anything.”

“That’s okay. I could just sleep beside you in bed at night and keep you warm.”

“Like Abishag.”

“Sorry? Who shag?”

“Abishag was a young girl who was chosen by the tribes of Israel to lie by the aged King David in his declining years, for precisely that purpose. But you’re not really serious, my dear?”

“I am. I like you, and it’s kind of crowded up there at the moment. I’d rather sleep with you down here.”

81

2008-01-24T09:19:00.000+13:00

• Scene [The plug (Sunday 22/11, c. 11.30 p.m.)]

[DAY 16]:
“We’re full of water!”

Angus starts up from sleep and looks over to see Diana, panic-stricken, crying out while trying to bail as fast as she can. The boat is half-swamped, and the other survivors (ten or so people) are looking up sleepily from their drenched sails and bits of old clothing.

The plug-hole is visible below the waterline, gleaming blue like a little light, opening up into tempting vistas of the deep. Angus is fascinated by it, and stares down at it for a moment before pulling himself together and starting to hunt for the plug. He finds it, eventually, in a locker, and hammers it home after an ecstasy of fumbling. The dull hard work of bailing recommences.

The people nearest the hole subside into slumber, having barely stirred during the whole excitement.

• Scene [Saboteur (Monday 23/11, c. 1.30 a.m.)]

[DAY 17]:
Angus wakes again to the sound of gurgling water. The moon is reflecting white on the water both inside and outside the boat. He replaces the plug and lies down again, this time with this eyes open a slit.

We see a hand reaching towards the plug. In the dim light it is impossible to see whether it’s white or brown. Angus pounces, and catches hold of it. Looking up, we see the face of the young engineer Angus talked to earlier.

“What are you doing? Are you crazy? You could have killed us all!”

“We’re all going to die anyway, so we might as well go together.”

The engineer’s eyes are wide and staring, and it’s clear he’s gone insane.

Angus deputes some of the others to watch him, but he grabs the first-aid box and jumps over the side with it before any of them can stop him. The two disappear together in an instant, but the camera follows them a long way down into the deep.

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2008-01-24T09:16:00.000+13:00

sense of the forest: is it light or dark? Is it overgrown, or easy to travel through?”

Even Joo Li’s sulky little face is screwed up in concentration. What mad, baroque forest does she inhabit? Corkscrew trees, the souls of the living suspended in their branches?

the incense cones

“After some time, you come to a clearing in the forest. Step out into the clearing, and take a good look around.”

The clearing is cramped and wet, with the rotting trunks of fallen trees across it. You pick your way gingerly through the shadowy moss, where garish toadstools grow.

condensed milk

“There is a path on the other side of the clearing. You walk across to it.”

There is no path, just an impenetrable screen of trees. You hunt in vain for a pathway through them, but there is none. The forest looks threatening, intertwined, endless.

the cup (I’ve forgotten the cup)

“You follow the path. After a while, it leads you out of the forest and towards a little house. You walk up to it, and knock at the door.”

The house looks cosy enough: a Grimms’ fairytale cottage, with a thatched roof and smoke coming out of the chimney. It has a big door-knocker, the worm Ouroboros clenched in a lion’s mouth, and you give it two sharp taps.

a job in Copenhagen

“You knock, but there is no-one at home. At least, nobody answers the door. You walk to the window and look in through it. What do you see there?”

You are looking into a bed-sit with an impressionist print up on the wall: Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte.” The strangely placid pointilliste figures look out into their endless afternoon, unperturbed by what is going on below them. Why? A young woman is crouched there, naked, her haunches raised in the air. Behind her, a strange animal figure, half-man, half wolf is pumping her with feral abandon. He turns and snarls at you through the window. The books in

83

2008-01-24T09:13:00.001+13:00

What then, did the planners of the city do? The phrase “dormitory suburb” took on a new meaning here. The outer wheel, largest in area, lightest in construction, perspex and unbreakable glass for the most part, became the kingdom of the sun – brighter than anything in the dreams of Campanella. Inside that came the shadowy wheel of sleep and night-time, built like an old European city of tenements and alleys – Prague, or Brussels, or Edinburgh. The innermost hub was reserved mainly for machinery and the vast engines which provided power, light and ventilation. There, too, the starships docked, though their passengers and crews did not stay there long – jetting swiftly outwards into the long boulevards of the outer city for the most part.

Travel is by endlessly moving pathways rather than by vehicles, because in this way the illusion of the city can be kept up. The moment one feels enclosed the city has become a vast trap – a rat’s maze of streets with but the one exit: outwards, from the hub of the wheel.

Bruno walks everywhere, along the miles and miles of outer streets, looking out at the sun and infinite space and trying to count the stars. For the most part, he speaks to no-one and nobody speaks to him. The outer city is a busy, bustling place, necessary after the melancholy of the dark city to which everyone must return at night. Sometimes he stops at a café or little bistro, for such visits leave a record, and he thinks it important that anyone looking for him should know where he has been. He is looking for something, he knows, something he will know when he sees it, but he does not know what.

The outer city holds no secrets, though; everything – workplaces, pleasure-gardens, spas – is open to the eye, so it is not long before he begins to angle his attention to the night. The dark tenements are, by their nature, hidden and impenetrable. One can enter only the building to which one is assigned, and all these assignments are recorded on the giant information web known as the link. With Ann’s help, he has devised some ways of getting into the other buildings, but finds them disconcertingly similar to his own. Each has a concierge, and flights of stairs as well as furniture lifts – each has a roof sealed off from easy access, which turns out to be (in fact) a ceiling, as he discovers after some rather breakneck manoeuvres one day. Gravity is lower in the middle of the wheel from that maintained on the rim, which makes climbing easy, but above there is nothing except a black roof of steel.

There is nothing for it, after that, but the exploration of the hub. There are some workers there (Julie was one of them), but it was never a popular assignment. Little attempt is made in this innermost part of the city to keep

84

2008-01-24T09:11:00.000+13:00

ACT IV: Drifting

• Scene [The first dream (Tuesday night 8/12)]

Angus is dreaming. He’s still lying in the boat, but now he hears a scraping under the keel. He looks down; the water has turned glistening blue, and he can see golden sand gleaming through it, with little white shells. Looking up, he sees a beach lying before him. It’s wide and white, and fringed with a dark green belt of palm-trees and tropical luxuriance.

He looks over. The other two survivors, Tiny and Diana, are still asleep. Springing over the side of the boat, he begins to wade his way in towards shore. When he reaches it he casts himself face down upon it and begins to clutch at the dry hot sand convulsively with his cupped fingers. Parrots and raucous birds sing in the background.

Angus is walking along the beach, still in his stained uniform, but with his socks and shoes in one hand and his trousers rolled up past his calves. The beach ends in a little promontory of rock, which he begins to edge out along. Coming round it, he sees a little beach nestled in between the cliffs. There is someone sitting in the middle of the white sands. It’s a young woman, wearing a knee-length dark dress and a white blouse.

She does not look up as he approaches, but when he reaches her and says “Ellie,” she replies “Angus,” still looking down.

“What are you doing here, Ellie? I thought you’d left me.”

“I’m sorry, Angus, but that’s how it had to be.”

“I needed you, Ellie, you were all I had.”

“Don’t put it all off on me. I was lonely. You weren’t there – you were always at sea. I needed someone there.”

“But … Ellie… you know you …”

“And now you’ve got them. Your little crew. Your girl.”

“She’s not my girl. You were my girl, Ellie, you know that.”

“I know that I hardly had a laugh or a smile out of you all the time we were together. He makes me laugh.”

“He …!”

As Angus starts to shout angrily, the sky darkens above their heads. He looks up anxiously. There’s a tropical storm coming on.

85

2008-01-24T09:05:00.000+13:00

the small bookcase – Plato, Ficino, Frances Yates – look familiar. They belong to you.

the Madonna on the wall

“You leave the house behind and continue walking across the fields. Then you come to a wall.”

The wall is huge and made of stone, with little finials and turrets. Vines and roses overhang it in such a way as to forbid approach. It must be a good ten or twelve feet high, and is quite impassable.

the missal in the cupboard

“Can you get over the wall? As you look for a way past it, you see a key lying in the ground at your feet. You stoop and pick it up.”

Each of the three – Natasha, Joo Li, Dong Hoon – is concentrating hard. Each one of them is bending down and picking up a key: keys of silver, gold or iron, shiny or spotted, intricate or tiny. The alchemy of the dream absorbs them.

the spider under the glass

“Look hard at the key. As you stare at it, you begin to feel the dream slipping away from you. You start, and wake up.”

a home away from home

They start, and wake up …

GET

SET

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2008-01-24T09:03:00.000+13:00

“Now see what you’ve done!” she concludes, triumphantly.

The sand heaves up around them, turning back to sea – long Atlantic combers. Angus sinks into them with a despairing cry: “Ellie!” But she is gone.

He opens his eyes. He is still in the boat, surrounded by the cold grey waves of reality.

• Scene [Rain (Wednesday night 9/12)]

…

• Scene [The ship (Saturday night 12/12)]

…

87

2008-01-23T11:00:00.000+13:00

The Great Hunger

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ! since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, ! matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond

– G. M. Hopkins, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection”

As you approach your turn-off, the urge to drive down it, towards your malodorous flat, dwindles to naught. Instead, you swing the big car north on Sunset [… the little Mazda west on Jervois Road …]. A green arrow deflects you, beckoning you down the dark canyon of Curran street, the Harbour Bridge approach.

You drive past the Westhaven breakwater (not without a sigh for those dark waters of the bay), and then you are racing up the bridge, rewarded by a brief dazzle of light as you crest its peak and see grandstanded before you Devonport, Bayswater, and the whole North Shore. Down on your left, the double pillbox promontory of Fisherman’s wharf looks curiously tenantless. Even the styley restaurants must be closed at this hour.

Once there were tollbooths at the ends of these lanes, but no more: instead, there is a speedway of competing trajectories as cars comet along, jockeying for position on the northern motorway. Not now, though. There are no more than one or two other vehicles in sight as you race past the Takapuna turnoff, Esmonde Road – home of old Frank’s fibrolite bach.

Past the golf driving range (a landfill seeping into the mangrove swamps of Shoal Bay, pukeko-haunted by day), and up the hill towards the Northcote turnoff … No, the road is calling still. You don’t turn off, but continue, past Tristram Ave (neon garishness of Wairau Rd), past Upper Harbour Highway, and down through the intricate bollards and barriers guarding the next, unfinished leg of the motorway.

And now into Albany village. Traffic lights interrupt you here, but you’ve found a late-night channel on the radio, and the music lulls you from thinking.

Thiss iz howee bardee

88

2008-01-23T10:58:00.000+13:00

ACT V: The Ship

Diana was lying on the doctor’s couch, and when the three of us were left alone for a while she bounced up and down on the springs and said, “This is better than lying in that wet boat.”
– Angus Macdonald

• Scene [On board (Saturday night 12/12)]

…

• Scene [The Captain (Saturday night 12/12)]

…

• Scene [Diana bounces (Saturday night 12/12)]

…

• Scene [Water (Saturday night 12/12)]

…

• Scene [The second dream (Sunday morning 13/12)]

Angus is out in the sun. He looks up at it, smiles. Looking down, he can see that his uniform is dry and neat, no longer sodden and patched. He looks over. There is Diana, in a nice frock, smiling at him, her hair done. On the other side, there is Tiny, large and imposing as ever, but now as neat as a new pin.

He looks down, they’re moving over planks, and we can see the sun glinting up from the sea below, through the interstices – flash, dark, flash, dark.

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2008-01-23T10:57:00.000+13:00

moment, though, his job is to observe, not act. He judges Ann and Julie to be sincere, as indeed he is himself, with them. In any case, they behave towards him in a loving manner, and that – to him – is indistinguishable from love. Perhaps it is indistinguishable from love.

The old man has disappeared, but Bruno can call up the myriad possible pathways accessible from this spot from his former explorations. He sets out, slowly, to traverse them.

When he finds him, in a little alcove set off from the corridor, the old man is sitting on his suitcase and playing on an odd instrument, a kind of bulbous, elongated recorder. Or, at any rate, he is blowing softly into it and moving his fingers up and down on the stops with a curious, jerky motion. Nothing comes out, save a faint hissing sound. Seeing a uniformed man standing in front of him, the old man puts down his flute and looks up with an expression of bland enquiry, as if he has been interrupted in the midst of some vital yet ordinary task.

“What are you playing?” asks Bruno.

“Your question is imprecise, young man. If you mean to ask what musical instrument am I playing, this is a chanter – a kind of practice player for the bagpipes. Alas, my bagpipes are long gone, and I would hardly have the wind to play them if they weren’t! If you mean to ask what piece I’m playing, it is the Lament for Mary MacLeod, an ancient Highland tune in the musical form known as piobaireachd.”

“Would you play it for me?”

“Certainly, young man, certainly.”

The old man seems happy to display his skills on the ancient mouthpiece, and begins to produce a series of odd, discordant noises, with little relation to any of the melodic forms Bruno knows. For ten minutes or so he continues, then stops with a sigh.

“I suppose that means nothing to you.”

“No,” said Bruno.

“Well, where should I begin? Do you have the time for the full story, or are you going somewhere in a hurry?”

“Nowhere.”

“The origins of this art are lost in the depths of time, but if we begin in the city of Cremona, in Italy …”

90

2008-01-23T10:54:00.000+13:00

Kumon evreebahdee …

You pass the Albany pub (gentrified from its former station), then accelerate up the long wooded hill which leads toward the Riverhead Road. The land has turned to lifestyle blocks now, unlighted. You can put your lights on full beam. The turns are sharper, though, and it is a relief to reach the straights of Dairy Flat. No-one is waiting to turn out. You go on to Silverdale. There too, the lights are on, but no-one’s out walking the wide New World streets. Over the hill, past the fire station, and down to the long flat beachfront of Orewa.

So tie your long hair up again
This is the end of every dream …

You’d thought, originally, you might stop there. Gaze at the sea, stroll along the beach … no such luck. The car is telling you to keep driving, and you weather the three or four banks of traffic lights without impatience, before winding up yet another precipitous hill. Past Hatfield’s, and Waiwera, and Wenderholm, then over into the Puhoi valley. The road is good; you drive with easy intensity.

tango dancer
spun out of time

Somewhere along a long straight north of Warkworth, the impulse suddenly deserts you. Sleepiness erupts. You should be home, not here. It takes some time to find a place to do a U-turn, but you are assisted by the lack of other traffic – any other traffic.

Caught in a hailstorm
and there’s nowhere to shelter

On the way back, you imagine yourself stopping to pick up a hitchhiker. But who could be out at this time, in the small hours of the morning? Perhaps another Maori boy? You shudder at the memory. You’re past all that now, past all that intensity …

GAY

RAVE

91

2008-01-23T10:51:00.000+13:00

He looks up again. There are ships all around them, the Liver birds arching above them, but they are walking quickly towards the shore, the city, the trams, away from the sea.

He blinks his eyes again, and opens them on a summer landscape: green lawns, overhanging trees. He is sitting on a bench, beside a hedge, watching a game of tennis. Diana is playing with a young man, returning the ball with great gusto, running and laughing like a spirited schoolgirl. The young man looks a little sinister, dark and toothy, and Angus frowns. He looks around for Tiny, but Tiny is no longer there.

A couple of ponies poke their heads over the hedge, and Angus walks over to pat them.

As he draws closer, they seem a little less friendly, huge teeth showing in their mouths. They are scowling and grimacing at him.

Angus looks back in Diana’s direction. The game is temporarily in abeyance; a small boy is running around looking for the ball. Diana nods encouragingly at Angus: “Give them an apple; they like that,” she shouts.

Angus reaches into his pocket and draws out an apple, clearly to his own surprise.

He offers it to the first of the ponies, who wolfs it down with huge teeth.

Looking round, he is just in time to see the arching fang-ranks of a shark’s mouth descending towards him, and draws back with a start.

It is the second pony, yet is also a shark when it opens its mouth.

He turns back to Diana.

She is still laughing and nodding, but the tennis court has become dark and deserted, as if evening has come on. A wind starts up, rattling leaves across the desolate space.

Angus turns back from the pines towards Diana. The young man, now wearing a black uniform, is leading her towards a low table covered with a white sheet. There is another man waiting there with a scalpel in one hand.

“No, Diana, no,” he yells.

“It’s all right, they’re friends of mine,” she shouts back to him, ringingly, throwing back her head and laughing.

At that the second man whips a plastic bag over her head, and we have a momentary glimpse of her eyes wide open in shock and terror when Angus again wakes up.

92

2008-01-23T10:49:00.000+13:00

means. When I say I knew her, she was in fact my wife. And this Ann you speak of?”

“She is my … lover and my friend. We live with another girl called Julie. Julie is also Ann’s lover.”

The old man seems a little disconcerted by this excess of information, but at length shakes his head and, muttering: “Autres temps, autres moeurs,” gets up and begins to rearrange his effects. Bruno swings the little suitcase on his back, and they begin to walk towards the spokes.

At length the old man regains the courage to speak, and begins tentatively: “Are you certain that your young lady friends would really welcome a visit? I mean, it sounds as if you may be a little crowded, and some kind of advance warning might be appropriate, might it not?”

“Ann will not care.”

“No, but … don’t you know, young ladies can be a little … exigent in the manner of personal appearance, and I feel uneasily conscious that I have not really been able to keep up my toilet in a way that my wife, at any rate, would have approved. What do you think?”

“You will be welcome. When I cried, they welcomed me.”

“You cried? You mean that you, too, were in temporarily embarrassed circumstances until rescued by these young ladies? Do you know, that makes me feel much better. I won’t deny having shed the odd tear myself after that most disagreeable interview with the security official on the other wheel. Really, I had done no harm to the rooms I was occupying, and one or two of the posters he tore down were really irreplaceable. He gave me no time to explain, but my Anthea, who was no mean artist, had drawn likenesses of some of my very particular heroes, with extracts from various forms of musical notation, and those were things I held very close to my heart …”

Bruno stops and embraces the old man, hard, then slaps him twice on the back before walking on. Bemused, but looking slightly more cheerful, the old man follows in his wake.

93

2008-01-23T10:48:00.000+13:00

“I could kill you!” I shouted.

“Yes, you could kill me, but I shall be dead soon enough anyway. I’m cold, Captain Jordan, Bruno Jordan – your name is like one of ours. I want you to hold me in my arms and warm me up. I shall never be warm again if you do not do that.”

And how could I refuse? It was not that I desired him. No, not that at all. I loathed him, his leathery, filthy skin, his shrunken face, but I held him next to me inside my sleeping bag, and after a while the same teasing warmth began to creep through us, through both of us. He whispered endearments in my ear, endearments framed for a score of lovers, no doubt. Once he told me to close my eyes, and then whispered in my ear, “Son’ il tuo Lorenzo.” At that my body tensed and spent, and I settled to sleep, shamed yet satisfied in the sticky remnants of my love.

94

2008-01-22T10:35:00.000+13:00

Government Issue

Are you a poof, man?
– Grand Inquisitor, 13/10/99

Q: … Do you understand these rights?
A: Yes.
Q: What were you doing in town?
A: I was at a demonstration.
Q: Where was the demonstration?
A: In Albert Park.
Q: What was the demonstration for?
A: Against student loans.
Q: How did you find out about the demonstration?
A: A friend told me.
Q: What friend was that?
A: A friend from university.
Q: Where did you get the jacket?
A: I bought it in a second-hand shop.
Q: What was the name of the shop?
A: I don’t remember.
Q: Where is it?
A: In Dominion Road.
Q: When was that?
A: About six months ago.
Q: Have you ever tried to impersonate a police officer?
A: No.
Q: Do you have any other items of police equipment in your possession?
A: No.

G

95

2008-01-22T10:32:00.000+13:00

• Scene [Torpedo (Friday morning 1/1/43, 4 a.m.)]

There is, again, movement in the dark depths. A faint pinging is heard, a swirling. Is there a shape, black against the blackness, moving through it? We are still straining to make it out when …

EXPLOSION.

CLOSE-UP of Angus’s eyes opening out of some unimaginable depth. Was the noise only in his dreams? It seems not: there are clanging pumps and sirens, shouting voices, all coming from outside.

WIDE-ANGLE shows his narrow, cramped cell, shared with Jack. There is little in the way of belongings: no ornaments or photographs. He rolls out of his bunk, starts (once more), to huddle on clothes and sea-boots …

The screen now shows, over black-and-white newsreel scenes of grey seas and sinking ships, the following lines:

At 4 A.M. on New Year’s Day, 1942, the Rhakotis – a blockade runner bound for St. Nazaire – was attacked and sunk by a British cruiser.

Angus Macdonald was picked up by a U-boat and carried to a French port, then escorted to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.

Jack Edmead reached Spain. He was repatriated to England, where he joined another ship, which was later torpedoed and sunk with all hands.

96

2008-01-22T10:31:00.000+13:00

The Lion

Why do we need anything else to happen? Joseph is sleeping with young Julie, Bruno is in the arms of Ann. They’re all happier than they were before – Julie at being taken seriously as a scribbler, Joseph at resembling a lover. Ann is pleased to let her cynical mask slip, Bruno is able to express the tenderness which is his sole residue of sexual feeling.

During the day, perhaps, as Ann and Julie continue their duties as guardians of the tenement, Bruno and Joseph talk, or take promenades through the streets, watching the busy life of the space wheel. In the evening they eat together, and talk of music, and love, and their past lives, and food, and all the other pleasures of human existence.

But it’s not enough, alas. You need more. Don’t forget that, while Joseph and Ann and Julie are all happily sleeping in one another’s arms [a difficult feat that, I’ve always found – so much easier to roll over and establish your own microclimate without reference to your companion’s breathing and body temperature], Bruno is lying awake. He cannot sleep. All he can do is combine and recombine the observations of his day into some kind of order.

You see, now, why his emotions have been so impoverished. It would not be long before he went mad under such circumstances if he were still an ordinary man. In effect, he has been driven mad artificially by the treatment he has received. He is conscious of himself, and of his difference from the others, but he does not long to sleep. If he did it would be intolerable.

Does he love Ann? She is, after all, entirely loveable, and is clearly very fond of him. He does, but with affection rather than passion. He enjoys having sex with her, but it is not an essential component of his love. We can define that other love almost in terms of what Bruno does not feel. He is not jealous of Ann; he does not mistrust her; he is not suddenly enflamed by a small gesture, a word, a crease of the lip. He is not critical or laudatory of her body and her appearance. He does not plan for the future, worry about his or her degree of commitment. Her sexual submissiveness to him is something he enjoys but does not require – just as he was prepared earlier on to play the part of submissive to her. There would have to be some internal resistance to overcome for this to turn into true sensuality.

97

2008-01-22T10:28:00.001+13:00

As there is little chance of my reaching human aid alive I greatly regret my inability to set out the coast line as surveyed for the 300 miles we travelled and the notes on glaciers and ice formations, etc.

It is strange to wake in the arms of a dead man. A girl, yes, though even there one tosses and turns so as to connect with the other only at a flank, a leg, a touch. And not dead, no. Just that deadness of not wanting to touch again, that early morning shame.

Here, though, Filippo was wholly pressed against me, his mouth lolling open to show me the stub of his tongue. He was not yet stiff, and even his body still had some warmth in it – warmth robbed, I fear, from my own scant store.

I began to pull myself slowly from the bag, afraid to hurry, afraid that once I let the full strength of my revulsion show, I would tear the precious fabric to shreds. He stank like shit, like some animal, but I had to pull myself from him as delicately as a lover, afraid to wake the beloved as you start on the journey away.

Once before this, in the long days retreating from the crevasse, I had had to clean him, when he filled his trousers inadvertently, and this time, too, I could not let him go down into the cold ice unwashed. He was a brute, but, in the end, a loved and loving brute.

The bag I turned inside out before I strapped it onto the sledge. I could not imagine using it again, but knew that by nightfall I would crawl into it with the gratitude of a slave excused a beating. His own bag I used for grave-shroud, and – while I could not dig deep enough for my satisfaction – I laid him in the eternal ice with sorrow. There he will lie, unchanged, his mouth half-open (I could not close it) to show his few good teeth, that insinuating, caressing tongue silenced for good. There he will lie, more imperishable than Pharaoh, as the years turn and the centuries gather over his head, and his memories, his memories of that village Laura, her cruel ways, and that one fleet glimpse of a furry slit attenuate and perish in the cold.

I said none of that above his body, though. No, de mortuis nil nisi bonum. I read from the Bible, from the Song of Songs.

Nights with Giordano Bruno

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